In my post, I did not place blame on anyone or any administration for
anything.  I would invite you to read it again.

What I did say, with backup material is that Carter pushed his way into a
situation uninvited and brokered a treaty where in essence the North Koreans
were going to stop their nuclear weapons program and the US was going to
give them money, fuel and help them build two nuclear reactors.

The administration at that time told us that the North Koreans had agreed to
not pursue nuclear weapons in return for all this and please not to worry
about the nuclear reactors we were giving them because they could not be
used to create weapons grade material.  I guess it all depends on what the
words "weapons grade material" mean.  :)   Wow, shades of a déjà vu.


Denys...

-----Original Message-----
From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of
rosenblatt, joseph
Sent: Friday, October 18, 2002 12:34 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: OT:2002 Humor

Hyperbole can be humorous so the thread is aptly named. The facts are
otherwise but since when does that matter. To blame the US regime of 1994
for North Korean arms is not only incorrect it is misleading. Since I was
alive in 1994 and have a fair to middlin' memory let me help those of you
who were not yet alive understand what happened.

According to all accounts everyone involved in the negotiations were pretty
sure that N. Korea already had at least two and possibly three bombs worth
of fissile material. The agreement stopped the N. Koreans from enriching
plutonium. In fact they are no  longer  enriching plutonium; they are
enriching uranium which is a slower, costlier and less efficient process. If
they had continued to enrich plutonium, according to some experts, they
might be producing enough weapons grade fissile material to make thirty (30)
bombs a year. If any of this is true then it was not such a bad agreement.
(Side note: back to the present. SOD Rumsfeld said he thought the N Koreans
had two or three bombs.) One part of the agreement that for sure has not
been kept is the building of safe energy plants in N. Korea.

The previous American regime had a number of opportunities to make the world
safer and chose not to take those opportunities. They refused to sign on to
the mine limitation  treaty. They used the Air Force as there first line of
diplomacy and where that wasn't practical they sent the Marines. The current
regime may have taken it a step further but only a baby step. Every
President of the United States since FDR, with the possible exception of
Jerry Ford, has threatened to use Nuclear Weapons. (The present regime has
threatened to use Nucler Weapons but I think that's the same thing.)

There is plenty of blame to go around.

Pacifists are no happier to see arms in the hands of the N. Koreans then
they are to see them in the hands of Iraqis, Israelis, Canadians or The US
army. Pacifists want all people to beat the swords into plowshares. (In the
case of bombs please remove the firing mechanism before hitting them with a
hammer.) Even if you don't think Pacifism is practical you should at least
think it laudable.

Pray for Peace.
The opinions expressed herein are my own and not necessarily those of my
employer.
Yosef Rosenblatt


P.S. For those of you that do believe in prayer then I say Work for Peace.

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