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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (336972)	5/9/2007 6:40:55 AM
From: Road Walker	Respond to of 1572369

Wrestling Nuclear Genies Back Into the Bottle, or at Least a Can By CARLA ANNE ROBBINS It has been more than three weeks since North Korea missed the deadline to shut down its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, but we’ve heard only mild protests from the White House. President Bush, who once declared that he loathed North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-il, isn’t eager for another fight these days. Still, the North Koreans have a way of making even patient people apoplectic. In 1994, when Pyongyang first threatened to start churning out plutonium, Brent Scowcroft — the realpolitik-minded national security adviser for the first President Bush and a vocal opponent of this Iraq war — shocked the foreign policy establishment by calling for a strike on Yongbyon. President Clinton’s advisers also began talking privately about sending in the bombers, and what it would take to evacuate thousands of Americans from Seoul. The issue became moot after former President Jimmy Carter freelanced a compromise that helped freeze all activity at Yongbyon for nearly a decade. That is, until Mr. Bush decided that he could get more from the North Koreans for less. The North Koreans blame the current delay on Washington’s delay in securing the release of their $25 million in frozen bank funds. The Bush administration — which long insisted that the money was ill-gotten gains, not a bargaining chip — agreed to the unfreezing. But so far international bankers are balking at transferring money that the Treasury Department still says is tainted. That should be a lesson about the perils to come, including more deadlines for Pyongyang to miss and more crisis points for Washington to manage or turn into a showdown. Under the terms of a February deal, the North Koreans had until mid-April to “shut down and seal” Yongbyon’s nuclear facilities. That should take less than a day. Within minutes at the small reactor, technicians can insert control rods that absorb the neutrons from the uranium fuel and stop the chain reaction. The reactor and the nearby reprocessing facility — which chops up spent fuel and chemically separates the plutonium — can then be padlocked. For that, and readmitting international inspectors, Pyongyang has been promised 50,000 tons of fuel oil and improved relations with its neighbors and the United States. Then things quickly get complicated. In the next phase, Pyongyang is supposed to disable “all existing nuclear facilities” with the eventual goals of “abandonment” and “denuclearization.” For that it has been promised 950,000 tons of fuel oil, security guarantees, and a return to international good graces. But the agreement doesn’t say a lot more. Vagueness was apparently the only way to get North Korea and the White House — who still aren’t sure they want a deal — to sign on. It says nothing about the sequencing of concessions and rewards or what ”disablement’ and “abandonment” and “denuclearization” mean. What makes this especially hard is that nearly all nuclear technology can be diverted to make weapons. That means that there are many North Korean genies, not one, to be wrestled back into the bottle — and a frighteningly large number of ways they can spring back out again. To meet their commitment to disable the Yongbyon reactor, the North Koreans could do something easily reversible like disconnecting cooling pipes, or they could make it a lot harder on themselves by pouring concrete into the tubes that hold the fuel rods in place. The agreement offers no direction. It also doesn’t say what is supposed to happen to the reactor’s 8,000 fuel rods, which contain at least a bomb’s worth of plutonium. The Americans will want them put into stainless steel cans and shipped as quickly as possible out of the country. Nor does it say what should happen to the Koreans’ inventory of separated plutonium or the four to 10 weapons they may have built. Jon Wolfsthal, a former Energy Department aide who spent a month in Yongbyon in the mid-1990s preparing for the canning of fuel rods, says that Washington and its allies are going to have to decide which parts of the program they most want to see gone and what level of irreversibility they will insist on. “The more we ask for, the higher the price the North Koreans will demand,” he said. And then there is the question of whether the North Koreans will come clean about a possible, parallel uranium enrichment program — and how hard Washington will press the issue. The 1994 deal fell apart in 2002 after the Bush administration accused the Koreans of hiding such a program. Since the February agreement, some U.S. officials have suggested that they may have overstated the North’s progress, a suddenly convenient truth for the White House. What there isn’t these days is any serious talk about hitting Yongbyon. That falls off when you are sure an adversary has nuclear weapons. That is why the North Koreans are likely to keep upping the price for abandoning theirs. And why Mr. Bush and whoever comes after are going to need a lot of international support, a lot of patience, a thick checkbook and a very thick skin.

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (336972)	5/10/2007 12:01:43 AM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1572369

Ted, let me provide a translated version of your response to Steve: a) You're a Nazi. b) It's been scientifically proven that mixing smart children with the non-so-smart children tends to work. c) We need to throw more tax money around. d) You want to spend money on wars, rather than on schools or energy independence. Then let me clear up your translation: a)The material presented by that author gives off the same pejorative tone that was found in nazi literature. Accusations are made with little evidence to back it up. Therefore, it raises my concerns. b)Its been shown that mixing of bright kids with not so bright kids can benefit both groups. Its also true that mixing poor kids with rich kids can benefit both groups. Humans learn more quickly from diversity rather than homogeneity. And no, shortie, I'm not talking about gay men. c)I never encourage throwing money around. Its your bias that gov't spending is frivolous, not mine. Just as there are well run corporations there are well run gov'ts with the inverse being true as well. d)Huh? I hope that's clearer for you.