Monday, October 21, 2002
What were the North Koreans thinking? Here's one opinion on the subject:
I would more readily accept this kind of explanation if the DPRK had simultaneously 'fessed up about their nuclear program and announced its complete termination.
Faced with the urgent need to fend off economic collapse, Mr. Kim's confession of a uranium-based nuclear weapons program appears to many experts to have been a pragmatic, if ultimately misguided response to an insurmountable obstacle: a Bush Administration that had little interest in engagement.
Admission of the nuclear program rather than denial, appears to have been intended to "persuade the world that Kim Jong Il is a new kind of leader, and his leadership does not resort to terrorist means, or secrecy," said Han S. Park, director of the Center for the Study of Global Issues at the University of Georgia.
I would more readily accept this kind of explanation if the DPRK had simultaneously 'fessed up about their nuclear program and announced its complete termination.
