-- Defense Secretary Rumsfeld Warns North Korea of U.S. Military Capabilities --
By Helen Kennedy, Daily News, New York
Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
Dec. 24--WASHINGTON--As nuclear tensions grew sharply yesterday, Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sent a blunt warning to Pyongyang: America can fight
simultaneous wars with Iraq and North Korea.
"We are capable of winning decisively in one and swiftly defeating in the
case of the other," he said. "Let there be no doubt about it."
Delivering a vehement verbal attack on the "idiotic" leaders of North
Korea, Rumsfeld warned Pyongyang against seizing on America's focus on Iraq to
press a nuclear weapons program.
"If they do, it would be a mistake," he said.
Rumsfeld stressed that no military action to halt Pyongyang's renewed
nuclear ambitions was imminent.
Over the weekend, North Korea broke open seals on about 8,000 irradiated
fuel rods and removed United Nations monitoring cameras at a nuclear reactor in
Yongbyon that was mothballed in a 1994 nonproliferation deal with the United
States.
Experts fear North Korea has enough material to make four or five nukes
within six months.
The reactor is going back online, Pyongyang said, to provide electricity --
not plutonium for its weapons program -- because the Bush administration
recently halted fuel shipments. But Rumsfeld said North Korea doesn't need extra
juice.
"Their power grid couldn't even absorb that! If you look at a picture from
the sky of the Korean Peninsula at night, South Korea is filled with lights and
energy and vitality and a booming economy. North Korea is dark. It is a tragedy
what's being done in that country," he said.
Secretary of State Powell consulted with France, Russia, Britain, Japan,
China and South Korea as tensions mounted, said State Department spokesman Phil
Reeker.
"North Korea's actions over the past three days raise serious concerns,"
Reeker said. "Everyone in the international community is seized with the issue
and will be following it very closely."
North Korea said the "nuclear issue" could be settled if Washington signs a
nonaggression treaty with it.
But the Bush administration, steaming over North Korea's acknowledgment
that it secretly continued its nuclear program despite the 1994 agreement,
refuses to negotiate.
"We will not give in to blackmail," Reeker said. "We're not going to
bargain or offer inducements for North Korea to live up to the treaties and
agreements that it has signed."
Russia accused the Bush administration of igniting the new crisis over
North Korea by antagonizing the Communist state with "axis of evil" rhetoric.
"How should a small country feel when it is told that it is all but part of
forces of evil of biblical proportions and should be fought against until total
annihilation?" Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Mamedov told a Russian newspaper.
That idea prompted Rumsfeld to deliver a tongue-lashing.
"The leadership of the country is currently repressing its people, starving
its people, has large numbers of its people in concentration camps, driving
people to try to leave the country through China and other methods, starving
these people," he said.
"They had started doing all this well before President Bush came into
office; well before the 'axis of evil' speech," he said.
-----
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Business News.
25-Dec-2002 08:14:51 GMT
Source KRB - Knight-Ridder Tribune Business |
