Saturday, February 01, 2003
NORTH KOREA'S NUCLEAR PLANS WERE KNOWN
If this is true, why did the Bush Administration have Kelly confront the DPRK over the issue when it did?
In November 2001, when the Bush administration was absorbed in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, intelligence analysts at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory completed a highly classified report and sent it to Washington. The report concluded that North Korea had begun construction of a plant to enrich uranium that could be used in nuclear weapons, according to administration and congressional sources.
The findings meant that North Korea was secretly circumventing a 1994 agreement with the United States in which it promised to freeze a nuclear weapons program. Under that deal, the North stopped producing plutonium.
Now, however, there was evidence that the North was embarking on a hidden quest for nuclear weapons down another path, using enriched uranium.
Although the report was hand-delivered to senior Bush administration officials, "no one focused on it because of 9/11," according to an official at Livermore, one of the nation's two nuclear weapons laboratories. An informed member of Congress offered the same conclusion.
If this is true, why did the Bush Administration have Kelly confront the DPRK over the issue when it did?
