Quote:
Originally Posted by campfirewest
Quote:
Originally Posted by microbet
NK did halt testing and perhaps the nuclear program until the highly unreliable Bush administration made unverified claims that they didn't and stopped following the 1994 agreement.
Quote:
Originally Posted by campfirewest
Lol
This article was posted in SE recently, and though parts of it (like, everything about racism) are dumb as hell, this part backs up microbet:
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The main incident here has to do with the “Agreed Framework between the United States of America and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” signed between the two countries in 1994. The Agreed Framework — as it is usually called — basically traded the end of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program for normalized economic and diplomatic relations with the United States.
As a good faith step to spur the negotiations North Korea submitted to limited weapons inspections while the United States cancelled military exercises with South Korea. North Korea also used its plutonium production plants for energy, so the United States agreed to work with allies to provide them with fuel oil until two light water nuclear reactors — nuclear power plants that cannot be weaponized — could be built.
The United States failed to uphold its end of the agreement almost immediately. Two weeks after it was signed, Republicans took back Congress and labeled the agreement “appeasement.” They never provided sufficient funds for providing the fuel oil and the United States never met the obligations set in the Agreed Framework.
The Americans also failed to take even the first preliminary steps in building the light water reactors for over four years, and then moved at such a slow pace that there was no chance of meeting the timelines set in the Framework.
Finally, and most significantly, Congress blocked any attempts to begin normalizing relations between North Korea and the United States and Pres. Bill Clinton never pressed it to do so.
North Korea played along for at least four years and even warned us that it was going to restart its nuclear program a year before it actually began a pilot program. According to Leon Sigal, author of Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea, the North Koreans did not shift from this pilot effort to a full-scale weapons program until Pres. George W. Bush refused new negotiations in 2001.
North Korea “was playing tit for tat — cooperating whenever Washington cooperated and retaliating when Washington reneged, in an effort to end enmity,” Sigal wrote in 2007. This extended to the later Six Party Talks between North and South Korea, the United States, China, Japan and Russia which almost brought North Korea back into the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Talks broke down when the United States refused to release $24 million frozen in a Macau bank account, and North Korea tested its first nuclear weapon six months later. But for that $24 million there might be no nuclear threat from North Korea today.
I haven't independently researched this so I'm taking him at his word, but feel free to provide an opposing viewpoint if you wish cfw. The link you posted corroborates parts of this - going through the timeline, there's zero mention of LWRs actually being built until 1999 (when a contract is signed to start building them, five years after the Agreed Framework) and they never actually get built (in 2006 the organization set up to build them says "**** this, we're out").
Last edited by goofyballer; 04-29-2017 at 10:41 PM.