Thursday, January 30, 2003
Bill Clinton, who was President during the last crisis with North Korea over its nuclear arms program, said earlier this week that the United States should negotiate a comprehensive agreement with North Korea, before Pyongyang starts building bombs.
The United States should "give them a nonaggression pact if they want that, because we'd never attack them unless they did something that violated that pact anyway," he told Reuters in Davos, where he was attending the World Economic Forum. "North Korea has greater capacity to produce atomic weapons than Iraq does, and less capacity to feed itself than Iraq does. So for the North Koreans, their `cash crops,' if you will, are missiles and bombs."
"It is urgent that before they, out of economic necessity, get more irresponsible, we do what we can with the South Koreans, the Japanese, the Chinese and the Russians to make a big deal with them, a verifiable deal to end all nuclear programs and their long-range missile sales," he said, hewing to a multilateral approach. "They sometimes think the only way they can get anybody's attention is to misbehave."
"We can't keep going through this endless cycle of rewarding their misbehavior," said Mr. Clinton. whose administration negotiated a nuclear control agreement in 1994. "So we need a comprehensive agreement here, and I think we should do that sooner rather than later because they can make big bombs, and do it well."
Now he tells us.
