Wednesday, November 24, 2010

The real substance of Dr. Siegfried Hecker's remarks on North Korea's nuclear facility

Reading the intitial media hoopla of Dr. Siegfried Hecker's remarks on North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear site, you would get the impression that North Korea with its thousands of new nuclear reactors was churning out nuclear weapons in series.
Wrong!
Now, it turns out from Professor Hecker's remarks in Washington, his North Korean hosts shown him, yes, reactors, which the former head of Los Alamos National Laboratory, found to his amazement, modern and highly sophisticated. The North Koreans showed him 'light water nuclear reactors'. This is significantly different from the level red reporting we have been seeing in the press or the puffed up warlike rhetoric coming from the government and the chattering class.
Dr Hecker does not deny that uranium enrichment can be used for a nuclear programme but that is not what he saw.
In fact, to modernise its infrastructure, North Korea is building light water reactors. Is it embarrassing to mention that the Clinton administration agreed to build light water reactors and then did not?
Is it also impolite to confront the US with another unpleasant fact? Were it not for the perverseness of George W. Bush's policy, North Korea might not have exploded a nuclear device when it did and uninvited jointed the restrained club of nuclear nations?
So as in the past, the war party in Washington has cherry picked Dr. Hecker's words and 'invented' a narrative for its own designs and nefarious purposes.

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