Response to "Clinton's Latest Glow Job"

This week's Coulter column concentrates on the recent nuclear test, and how the nuclear militarization of North Korea is all Bill Clinton's fault. She even implies that Jimmy Carter is gay, claiming he believes Kim Il Sung is a "total stud." The North Korea nuclear test can even be blamed on the Lewinsky scandal:

Clinton promptly signed the [1994 Agreed Framework deal], so he could forget about North Korea and get back to cheating on Hillary.

That would be scandalous, indeed, but the Agreed Framework was signed in 1994 and Lewinsky didn't start working in the White House until 1995.

Under the 1994 Agreed Framework, North Korea agreed to shut down the nuclear power plants at Yongbyon and to stop building an additional plant at Taechon. The nuclear reactors at both these facilities use uranium as fuel and ultimately generate plutonium, which can be used to build nuclear weapons. The Framework also specified that two light-water reactors would be built to provide electricity. Light-water reactors can not be used as effectively to create weapons-grade plutonium.

In 1994, the Republicans took over Congress and funding and construction of the light-water reactors stalled. Significant construction did not start until 2002.

Although she habitually denigrates the New York Times, she quotes it in this column to report North Korea's reactivation of their nuclear weapons program:

And then on Oct. 17, 2002 — under a new administration, you'll note — The New York Times reported on the front page, so you couldn't have missed it: "Confronted by new American intelligence, North Korea has admitted that it has been conducting a major clandestine nuclear weapons development program for the past several years."

It’s not clear what the Times means by "the past several years." Coulter claims that the North Koreans began their other weapons development program "before the ink was dry," presumably meaning in 1994. But the same Times article that Coulter quotes also says this:

…the government of Kim Jong Il began in the mid- or late-1990's a secret, parallel program to produce weapons-grade material from highly enriched uranium.

Presumably, this refers to a non-nuclear program to increase the uranium-235 content. Essentially, Coulter is blaming the Clinton administration for failing to stop a weapons program it didn't know about, one that may not even have existed at the time.

Coulter’s column is nothing more than an exercise in buck-passing. Even assuming the worst-case scenario, that the North Korean enrichment program began immediately after the Agreed Framework in early 1995, that means the program was in existence for six years under the Clinton administration. However, it also means that the program has been in existence for six years under the Bush administration, the last four years of which were not even in secret.

It is also not clear what Coulter is suggesting the Clinton administration should have done. Although she mocks and insults Clinton's administration for addressing this problem through diplomacy and negotiation, the approach of the Bush administration toward North Koreas weapons program — which it began in the mid-1980s — has not been significantly different.

Under the Bush administration, North Korea has:

• expelled weapons inspectors and shut down nuclear monitoring programs
• restarted the plutonium-producing nuclear reactors at Yongbyon
• processed enough spent uranium rods into plutonium for as many as seven devices
• actually tested (probably unsuccessfully) a nuclear weapon

So the evidence once again contradicts another of Coulter’s attempts to use Bill Clinton as a scapegoat for the current administration’s oversights.

Update: In the time since this was initially written, American intelligence sources have determined that the nuclear material used in the October 9 test was plutonium, not uranium. This means that its origin was not the uranium-enrichment program, but probably the Yongbyon reactor. This also means it was probably generated during the first Bush's administration or since North Korea pulled out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, during the current Bush administration.

Sources:

• "Agreed Framework between the United States of America and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea." Wikipedia. Retrieved October 15, 2006.
• "Light water reactor." Wikipedia. Retrieved October 15, 2006.
• "N. Korea Declares Itself a Nuclear Power." Washington Post. February 10, 2005.
• "North Korean Fuel Identified as Plutonium." New York Times. October 16, 2006.
• "Nuclear Weapons Program." GlobalSecurity.org. Retrieved October 15, 2006.
• "The U.S.-North Korean Agreed Framework at a Glance." Arms Control Association. August, 2004.
• "Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center." Wikipedia. Retrieved October 15, 2006.

October 17th, 2006 Posted by Eric | , , , | 2 comments