Today I want to announce an important step forward in the situation in North
Korea. This afternoon we have received formal confirmation from North Korea
that it will freeze the major elements of its nuclear program.
South Korea with
support from Japan and other nations will bear most of the cost of providing
North Korea with fuel to make up for the nuclear energy it is losing. It was
intended to halt North Korea from obtaining plutonium out of a nuclear
reactor. Supposedly, this reactor was to supply electricity but it wasn't
connected to the electrical grid. The deal, which was struck in 1994, averted a
military conflict but it was heavily criticized, and it actually had a fair
amount of trouble getting off the ground and muddled through most of Bill
Clinton's term.
To this day, you are the highest ranking American official
to ever meet with the head of state — you did it as President Clinton's secretary of
state to solve the problem with Kim Jong-il.
Towards the end of his
presidency relations has begun to improve.
It's been a night of first giving it to Al Gore and then taking it away on the part of the
networks George Herbert — George Walker Bush, the new president of the United States.
Bush came into office in 2001 said he didn't want to do the Clinton approach.
States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil.
But the Bush administration couldn't figure out exactly what its
approach would be. So nothing really happened and that was the point when U.S.
intelligence discovered pretty firm evidence that they thought indicated
that North Korea was actually cheating on the agreement.
The Bush administration used this intelligence to confront the North Koreans and to say
they were going to punish them by ending the supply of fuel oil.
The North Koreans
said you end the fuel oil you've ended the agreement. They kicked out the
inspectors and they removed the plutonium.
Last night the government of
North Korea proclaimed to the world that it had conducted a nuclear test.
Bush suddenly wanted to make a deal and he empowered as negotiators to begin
negotiating directly with the North Koreans in a desperate effort to get
North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons and North Korea essentially
pocketed all those concessions and kept making nuclear weapons.
The Obama people
said they were not gonna make the same mistake. Unfortunately, for the next eight
years, the talks never really got started.
Pyongyang's latest missile test rattling
its neighbors. Japan on Monday saying the launch shows a step forward in North
Korea's weapons program.
The conundrum that the Trump administration faces is
that North Korea is a nuclear weapons state. Generally, countries do not give up
nuclear weapons that they have developed themselves. So could the agreed framework
have survived if George Bush had not killed it? That's unclear but once North
Korea got its hands on the plutonium, the nuclear genie was out of the bottle.
Here's one funny story that I heard about the great framework. An American
official was visiting the capital, Pyongyang, when he decided to visit a
little Museum that had you know little exhibits of landmarks in North Korea and
it had these little cars that would go up and down - you know ski lifts or things
like that - and he was surprised to see that there
was actually a replica of the nuclear facility at Yongbyon sitting there, but
unlike the other exhibits which had the running cars and moving chairlifts
this was completely dark. So he turned to his minder and asked him why was this
one not running and the minder looked at him completely seriously and said under
the agreed framework all nuclear activities must be halted.