Following up on yesterday’s post about North Korea’s newly updated propensity for missile testing, Carpetbagger can’t help but shake his head at the news that the “axis of evil” country has restarted a nuclear reactor that had been shut down in 1994.
Just one day after Secretary of State Colin Powell said that North Korea was making a “wise choice” by leaving the nuclear reactor idle, the country decided to reactivate it. As the AP explained, by restarting the reactor, North Korea could be “laying the groundwork for additional atomic weapons beyond the one or two it is believed to possess already.”
“The U.S. officials…said the reactivated facility starts a process that could yield nuclear weapons in about a year,” the AP reported. “But Pyongyang could add to its supply much earlier if it restarts a processing plant adjacent to the reactor. The plant could be used to reprocess 8,000 plutonium-laden spent fuel rods at the site; there is enough plutonium there to build five or six bombs in a few months.”
The New York Times report included one quote that was almost laugh-out-loud funny: “The latest move, one American official acknowledged tonight, will make it harder for the Bush administration to ‘take the position that this isn’t a crisis.'”
You think? An evil country led by a crazed madman with nuclear weapons restarts a nuclear reactor that could lead to the country producing weapons of mass destruction for its own use, not to mention possible sales to untold terrorists, and it will be harder for the administration to argue it isn’t an international crisis?
One of these days, the Bush administration will come up with a foreign policy towards North Korea. Let’s hope it’s a good one. After all, the clock is ticking…