Secretary of State Warren Christopher indicated Friday that the Clinton administration intends not only to stop the development of North Korea's still-primitive nuclear weapons program but to roll back whatever progress it has made so far.
The United States cannot accept any form of nuclear weapons program in North Korea, Christopher asserted in a meeting with Los Angeles Times reporters. He said the ultimate goal of American foreign policy is to ensure a Korean Peninsula without nuclear weapons."We in no sense are tolerating a nuclear program in North Korea," he said. It was the clearest indication to date that the Clinton administration intends to ask the North Korean government to give up or dismantle what it has already produced in its nuclear program.
In a television appearance last Sunday, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin had appeared to suggest that the United States might be able to live indefinitely with North Korea's nuclear program at its current, early stage of development. U.S. intelligence officials have estimated that the Pyongyang regime now has the material to produce one to two crude nuclear weapons, using plutonium that was processed after a nuclear facility was closed down in 1989.
"Whatever happened in 1989, the situation is not deteriorating now," Aspin had said in the final television appearance before his resignation last Tuesday.
"They (the North Koreans) are not developing more plutonium." The defense secretary said these conclusions were based on U.S. intelligence collection.