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... one which I've been researching of late.
The Carter-initiated Agreed Framework laid out pretty much what the North Koreans have wanted all along--a reliable source of electricity in exchange for full participation in the NPT. Almost from the start, in 1994, the initiative was dead on arrival in Congress. One commentator described it as "an orphan before it started."
There was a lot of foot-dragging in this country, but in others, as well. Therein lies the rub for the N. Koreans--they expected the West to come in and just start building them light-water reactors. There was a lot of whining and crying from the right in Congress and the European firms, such as ABB, which was responsible for tecnical oversight and coordination and some of the parts for the reactor system, really didn't do much for several years (there's just a lack of info right now to determine if that was, in part, something Rumsfeld intended, since he was a very active member of the ABB board of directors).
At any rate, the contract to build the reactors didn't get signed until 1999, and preliminary work didn't begin until 2000 (I recall reading something several months ago that suggested that the N. Koreans thought the power plants would be completed by 2000). Clinton proposed a revision of the agreement to finally get things off the ground, in 2000, but nothing came of it before he left office.
Two months after his inauguration, Bush wanted a review of the agreement, and a couple of months after that, the heat was on North Korea from the Pentagon--of which Rumsfeld was the head.
A lot of this, in ways I haven't yet completely fleshed out, has to do with Rumsfeld and the 1998 missile defense commission report. In a FORTUNE magazine article from a couple of years ago, Rumsfeld denied that the subject of North Korean reactors ever came up in ABB board meetings (others said, certainly, they must have, because of the issues of financial and political risk).
While Rummy is still the only American member of the board of ABB (for $190,000/yr, from 1990-2001), he's the commissioner of a US report essentially saying that North Korea is the biggest threat to peace on the planet and that's why we need national missile defense.
I'm still wondering if Rumsfeld was not telling the truth about ABB discussions of N. Korean nuclear power plants because he was the one dragging his feet on them, hoping for a political change in the US that would kill the plan and put NMD on a firmer appropriations footing.
It would seem so, based on Bush's actions immediately after inauguration--within weeks, Bush had ignored the agreement and cut off oil to North Korea (remember the North Korean delegation visiting Richardson in New Mexico, because he'd been Clinton's negotiator with the N. Koreans?), started with some very belligerent talk and pushed them at every opportunity, trying to get them to do something foolish, then sending Bolton in, of all people, to browbeat and threaten them, and then there was the "axis of evil" stuff.
Despite a small amount of evidence otherwise, this looks like the Bushies trying to create a reason for missile defense deployment, even though N. Korea doesn't have a missile even close to delivering a payload of any sort to US territory, and won't have for some years. After all, NMD was all they could talk about for the first months of the administration; all the while, terrorist threats were growing.
Cheers.
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