AMY GOODMAN: Professor Cumings, you just mentioned how A.Q. Khan had gotten nuclear material to North Korea. Three years ago, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh revealed that Pakistan was helping North Korea build the bomb. Hersh reported the CIA had concluded that Pakistan had shared sophisticated technology, warhead design information and weapons testing data with the Pyongyang regime. But according to Hersh, the Bush administration sat on the CIA report, because the White House didn’t want to divert the focus from Saddam Hussein, and Pakistan had become a vital ally in Bush's war on terror.
BRUCE CUMINGS: Well, I think Seymour Hersh is right. Pakistan did have a nuclear Wal-Mart for North Korea, Iran and Libya, other countries. We did not punish Pakistan in any way for this, even though they were the worst proliferators by far in the world. And the Bush administration, when it came in, in 2000, was presented during the transition, by Clinton administration officials, with intelligence that North Korea had begun importing enriched uranium technologies from Pakistan, and they sat on it for 18 months until the preemptive doctrine was announced in September of 2002.
James Kelly then went to Pyongyang the following month, in October of ’02, and confronted the North Koreans with this evidence of a second nuclear program. And the North Koreans, as they almost always do when confronted with their backs to the wall, said, “Fine, you know, we have it. We’ll see you later.” And they proceeded to kick out UN inspectors that had been on the ground for eight years, removed themselves from the NPT, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and reopened their reactors. Furthermore, they got control of 8,000 fuel rods that had been encased in concrete for eight years, and that probably is the plutonium that would be at the basis of this bomb test.
So, this was a complete and utter failure, because North Korea paid no penalty for jumping out of the NPT again, getting back their reactors. And the Bush administration continued to essentially argue inside the administration about whether to topple the regime or try and negotiate with it. So it was really quite a remarkable failure, and North Korea, let alone Pakistan, neither one of them, until now, has really paid much of a price for this.
AMY GOODMAN: Yesterday, Arizona Senator John McCain gave a speech in Detroit, and he said, “I would remind Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and other critics of the Bush administration policies that the Framework Agreement of the Clinton administration was a failure.” Explain what that Framework Agreement was.
BRUCE CUMINGS: Well, it was an agreement that came after a very dire threat of war in 1994 that froze their entire plutonium facility at Yongbyon in North Korea. They had seals on the doors, closed-circuit television, and at least two UN inspectors on the ground, 24/7, all the time. So there isn't any possibility of that agreement having failed. It held for eight years and denied North Korea the plutonium that would have allowed them to make more bombs. Senator McCain is engaged in some sort of demagoguery here, because I don't know a single expert who would say that that Framework Agreement was not successful, at least for eight years, in keeping North Korea's plutonium facility shutdown.
Now, the enriched uranium program is not even clearly a program for a bomb. It may be to enrich uranium for light-water reactors that were expected to have been built by the United States and its allies. But even if it is for a bomb, it’s much more difficult to enrich uranium to a weapons grade and create a uranium bomb than it is to create a plutonium bomb, plus they already have now, thanks to the Bush administration’s policies, the wherewithal for six to eight plutonium bombs, so in effect they don’t even need the other program.
People say North Korea cheated. Wow, isn’t that really terrible? Kim Jong-il cheated. I don't know anyone who thinks that Kim Jong-il is a person who can be trusted, but I do know that North Korea kept that agreement made in 1994 and the U.S. did not. We pledged ourselves to normalize relations with North Korea. We didn’t do that. We pledged ourselves to build light-water reactors. They got started in 2002. So when you actually look at that agreement between country X and country Y, rather than the endlessly demonized North Korean regime, you see that we are responsible, as well as the North Koreans, for the current situation.
But as far as Senator McCain is concerned, he is just flat wrong. It’s not a partisan question. It’s a question of knowing what that agreement was and whether it was carried out or not.
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. Thank's for that info, as I was not aware. Can you put a date to that fact so I can put it into prespective? 
