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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: willcousa who wrote (763077)	6/29/2007 11:02:48 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 769670

Actually... the Clinton era deal (interim, though it was) covered just breeder reactors which could have been used to produce plutonium. (NK's original supply of weapons grade plutonium was given to them by CHINA, early in the first Reagan/Bush administration.) With regard to the production of further bomb-grade plutonium, you could say that the seals the deal put on their reactors, and the 24 hour cameras and international monitoring, actually accomplished their intended purpose --- while the seals were on NK produced no usable plutonium, and did not further expand their bomb potential... (only when the seals came off in the Bush II years did NK actually begin extracting plutonium from reactor fuel, and expanding upon the small amount of plutonium China had originally given them....) However, (&, IMO, this could be regarded as a 'failure' for the Clinton-era deal, since it did not address this possibility) of course it was only called an 'interim deal', and it was always intended to be expanded upon... the original deal never addressed the separate possibility of NK beginning a uranium enrichment program --- totally aside from plutonium breeding. Enrichment of usable amounts of uranium to weapons grade would entail a massively expensive, and possibly multi-decade long program... and NK only began making noises like this well into the Bush II years. So, to sum, they NOW have plutonium enough to (perhaps) make a dozen to a double dozen or so weapons (where previously, prior to Bush II terms, they only had enough - from China - for two or three bombs)... and the state of any 'uranium enrichment program' is still pretty much a big mystery --- although they DID acquire centrifuge plans and technical help from (our 'ally') Pakistan, and the A.Q. Khan network.