Le Monde (Paris), in an editorial published Tuesday and translated below, called North Korea's successful nuclear weapons test a "bitter fruit" of Bush administration policy and said it constituted "a major risk, not only for the region, but also for the international community as a whole."[1] -- Arab News took a similar line it its editorial, but cited the Iraq war as the key event motivating North Korea to develop the bomb: "It was President George W. Bush who pushed the diplomatic button that yesterday triggered North Koreas first nuclear weapon. He did it on March 20, 2003, when the first U.S. cruise missiles smashed into Baghdad."[2] -- Dan Plesch, writing in the London Guardian, also on Tuesday, made the same point: "Far from being crazy, the North Korean policy is quite rational. Faced with a U.S. government that believes the Communist regime should be removed from the map, the North Koreans pressed ahead with building a deterrent."[3] -- "[S]ince the end of the Cold War," Plesch wrote, "the nuclear states have tried to impose a double standard, hanging on to nuclear weapons for themselves and their friends while denying them to others. Like alcoholics condemning teenage drinking, the nuclear powers have made the spread of nuclear weapons the terror of our age, distracting attention from their own behavior." ...
1.
[Translated from Le Monde (Paris)]
Editorial
A DANGEROUS TEST
Le Monde (Paris)
October 10, 2006
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3216,36-821423,0.html
North Koreas is being condemned by all, its Chinese ally included, for the nuclear test with which it has just indulged itself -- one that can only have a destabilizing effect on northeast Asia, where it risks setting off an arms race. "Irresponsible conduct" of a Stalinist regime "at bay"? This dangerous "diplomacy on the edge of the abyss" on the part of Pyongyang is also a "bitter fruit" of the George Bush's policy with respect to this country since he arrived in power. And it invites us to ask ourselves about about how well founded a policy theoretically destined to dissuade the regime from equipping itself with nuclear weapons can be, when it has had the opposite effect.
In 1994, Pyongyang and Washington reached a no doubt imperfect agreement to freeze North Korean plutonium production program in exchange for furnishing light-water reactors and security guarantees. When in October 2002 it provoked a new nuclear crisis on the grounds that North Korea was clandestinely enriching uranium, Washington smashed the only "bolts" restraining Pyongyang's ambitions: the freeze, under the surveillance of the International Atomic Energy Agency, of its plutonium program, foreseen in the 1994 agreement. Washington declared this null and void, and Pyongyang left the non-proliferation treaty and resumed its production of plutonium.
Paradoxically, the quest for a dissuasive capacity on North Korea's part is also an appeal for dialogue with the United States in order to obtain security guarantees in exchange for the suspension of its nuclear program. The six-party talks -- China, the two Koreas, the United States, Japan, Russia -- might have been a space for dialogue. But they have run aground. The agreement on principles, which came in September 2005 at the end of the fourth session, was followed by an American offensive against the regime's "criminal intrigues," combined with financial sanctions that have strangled the country. And Pyongyang then refused to return to the negotiating table.
Whatever Washington's responsibilities, and even if North Korea's initiative marks the failure of the global compromised devised by the Clinton administration in the 1990s, from now on the North Korean bomb constitutes on a major risk, not only for the region, but also for the international community as a whole. The world now has to deal with a ninth nuclear power. It can only have increased the risks of proliferation and, more gravely, of the transmission of nuclear technologies to terrorist organizations. As for the others seeking nuclear weapons, they can only be encouraged to pursue their programs.
--
Translated by Mark K. Jensen
Associate Professor of French
Department of Languages and Literatures
Pacific Lutheran University
Tacoma, WA 98447-0003
Phone: 253-535-7219
Home page: http://www.plu.edu/~jensenmk/
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
2.
Editorial
NORTH KOREA'S DETERRENT
Arab News
October 10, 2006
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=87958&d=10&m=10&y=2006
It was President George W. Bush who pushed the diplomatic button that yesterday triggered North Koreas first nuclear weapon. He did it on March 20, 2003, when the first U.S. cruise missiles smashed into Baghdad. He had prepared even earlier in January 2002 when in his State of the Union Address he called North Korea, Iran, and Saddams Iraq the The Axis of Evil.
At the time, North Korea protested the Bushs assertion was little short of a declaration of war. Pyongyang withdrew from tortuous negotiations to abandon its nuclear-weapons program in return for aid and restarted its Yongbyon reactor. It is now clear that from this date it raised a series of diplomatic smokescreens during on-off negotiations within the Six Nation forum with China, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United States. In January 2003, when it had become patently clear that Washington was poised to invade Iraq, North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Since then it has tested missiles and announced that it had six nuclear devices. At each revelation, the rest of the world, with Washington in the lead, has huffed and puffed. China, Pyongyangs only real ally and supplier of much of its energy and essential foodstuffs, has preferred to use gentle persuasion. In the event neither strategy has worked. The North Korean leadership has exploited international differences and Washingtons entrapment in the diplomatic and military mire of Iraq.
In its terse announcement of the successful test, the North Korean news agency asserted, It will contribute to defending the peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and in the area around it. It is hard not to disagree with this. If the international community was unable to intervene decisively while Pyongyangs scientists were hurrying to make their bomb, how much harder will intervention be now? It matters not that this explosion was equivalent to only 800 tons of TNT when one of the bombs the Americans dropped on Japan in 1945 represented the force of 15,000 tons of the explosive. North Korea has joined the nuclear club and the very unpredictability of its Stalinist regime makes its bomb that much more powerful.
The long-established Western nuclear powers, America, Britain, and France, always described their terrible atomic arsenals as deterrents. That is precisely what North Korea has now obtained, what Iran may still want to obtain, and what before he was driven back from Kuwait and had his WMD program dismantled by U.N. inspectors, Saddam Hussein was trying to obtain. A nuclear weapon, however primitive, will deter outside aggression and entrench inside despotism. Its that simple. Bush unleashed U.S. military might on Iraq because he knew (despite pretending otherwise) it had no nuclear weapons or the other WMDs -- namely the chemical stockpiles that were supplied by the U.S. during the Iran-Iraq War and were decommissioned after the First Gulf War.
North Korea has learned the lesson on how to deter such aggression. Thus once again Bushs own weapon of choice has proved to be a boomerang.
3.
Comment
NORTH KOREA'S NUCLEAR POLICY IS NOT IRRATIONAL AT ALL
By Dan Plesch
** We are heading towards another pre-emptive war and Japanese nuclear weapons unless pressure for disarmament revives **
Guardian (UK)
October 10, 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1891568,00.html
North Korea's nuclear test is only the latest failure of the West's proliferation policy. And it demonstrates the need to return to the proven methods of multilateral disarmament. Far from being crazy, the North Korean policy is quite rational. Faced with a U.S. government that believes the Communist regime should be removed from the map, the North Koreans pressed ahead with building a deterrent. George Bush stopped the oil supplies to North Korea that had been part of a framework to end its nuclear program previously agreed with Bill Clinton. Bush had already threatened pre-emptive war -- Iraq-style -- against a regime he dubbed as belonging to the axis of evil.
The background to North Korea's test is that, since the end of the Cold War, the nuclear states have tried to impose a double standard, hanging on to nuclear weapons for themselves and their friends while denying them to others. Like alcoholics condemning teenage drinking, the nuclear powers have made the spread of nuclear weapons the terror of our age, distracting attention from their own behavior. Western leaders refuse to accept that our own actions encourage others to follow suit.
North Korea's action has now increased the number of nuclear weapon states to nine. Since 1998 India, Pakistan, and now North Korea have joined America, China, France, Russia, Israel, and the UK.
The domino effect is all too obvious. Britain wants nuclear weapons so long as the French do. India said it would build one if there were no multilateral disarmament talks. Pakistan followed rapidly. In Iran and the Arab world Israel's bomb had always been an incentive to join in. But for my Iranian friends, waking up to a Pakistani bomb can be compared to living in a non-nuclear Britain and waking up to find Belgium had tested a nuclear weapon.
East Asia is unlikely to be different. In 2002 Japan's then chief cabinet secretary, Yasuo Fukuda, told reporters that "depending on the world situation, circumstances and public opinion could require Japan to possess nuclear weapons." The deputy cabinet secretary at the time, Shinzo Abe -- now Japan's prime minister -- said afterwards that it would be acceptable for Japan to develop small, strategic nuclear weapons.
It was not supposed to be like this. At the end of the Cold War, disarmament treaties were being signed, and in 1996 the big powers finally agreed to stop testing nuclear weapons for the first time since 1945. The public, the pressure groups, and the media all breathed a great sigh of relief and forgot about the bomb. Everyone thought that with the Soviet Union gone, multilateral disarmament would accelerate.
But with public attention elsewhere, the Dr. Strangeloves in Washington, Moscow, and Paris stopped the disarmament process and invented new ideas requiring new nuclear weapons. A decade ago, Clinton's Pentagon placed "non-state actors" (i.e. terrorists) on the list of likely targets for U.S. nuclear weapons. Now all the established nuclear states are building new nuclear weapons.
The Bush administration made things worse. First, it rejected the policy of controlling armaments through treaties, which had been followed by previous presidents since 1918. Second, it proposed to use military -- even nuclear -- force in a pre-emptive attack to prevent proliferation. This policy was used as a pretext for attacking Iraq and may now be used on either Iran or North Korea. More pre-emptive war will produce suffering and chaos, while nothing is done about India, Israel, and Pakistan. So we are left with a policy of vigilante bravado for which we have sacrificed the proven methods of weapons control.
Fortunately, there is a realistic option. Max Kampelman, Ronald Reagan's nuclear negotiator, has proposed that Washington's top priority should be the elimination of all weapons of mass destruction on earth, including those possessed by the U.S. At the ongoing disarmament meetings at the U.N., the vast majority of nations argue for a phased process to achieve this goal. They can point to the success of the U.N. inspectors in Iraq as proof that international inspection can work, even in the toughest cases. The Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty that removed the missiles from Greenham is an example of an agreement no one thought possible that worked completely. This, and other legacies from the Cold War, can and should be applied globally.
A group of Britain's closest allies, including South Africa and Ireland, are trying to broker a deal on global disarmament. Tragically, Britain won't be helping. Political parties and the media are deaf to these initiatives. The three main parties all follow more or less the U.S. approach. They know that no U.S. government will lease the U.K. a successor to Trident if London steps out of line on nuclear weapons policy. The media almost never report on U.N. disarmament debates. Disarmament has become the word that dare not be said in polite society.
Do we have to wait for another pre-emptive war or until the Japanese go nuclear before the British political class comes to realize that there can be a soft landing from these nuclear crises?
--Dan Plesch, a fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies and Keele University, is the author of The Beauty Queen's Guide to World Peace.
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