Rolling blunder: how the Bush administration let North Korea get nukes

Washington Monthly, May, 2004 by Fred Kaplan

Crossing the red line

When their overtures to Richardson led nowhere, the North Koreans escalated tensions again. Over the next two weeks, U.S. spy satellites detected trucks pulling up to the site where the fuel rods were stored, then driving away toward the reprocessing facility. When Kim Il Sung threatened to take this step back in 1994, Clinton warned that it would cross a "red line." When Kim Jong-il actually did it in 2003, George W. Bush did nothing.

Specialists inside the U.S. government were flabbergasted. This was serious business. Once those fuel rods left the storage site, once reprocessing began, once plutonium was manufactured, the strategic situation changed: Even if we could get the North Koreans back to the bargaining table, even if they would agree to drive the fuel rods back, we could never be certain that they'd totally disarmed; we could never know if they still had some undeclared plutonium hidden in an underground chamber. (Even before this crisis, the CIA estimated that the North Koreans might have built one or two bombs from the plutonium it had reprocessed between 1989 and 1994.)

In March 2003, President Bush ordered several attack planes, as well as some B-1 and B-52 bombers, to the U.S. Air Force base in Guam, well within range of North Korea. The clear intent was to signal a possible impending air strike on the reactor. It was a feeble threat, a classic case of shutting the barn door after the horses escaped: By this time, the fuel rods were gone and possibly hidden away. Indeed, Bush made no moves to support, or otherwise prepare for, an air strike; there were no movements of ground or naval forces to deter or beat back a possible North Korean retaliatory strike or invasion. Nor was the movement of air forces accompanied by any diplomatic moves. In May, Bush ordered the aircraft back to their home bases.

Highway chicken

What explains Bush's inaction before North Korea crossed the red line--and its weak response afterward? Historians will surely debate that question for decades. Part of the answer probably lies in the administration's all-consuming focus on Iraq. Military mobilization toward the Persian Gulf was in full swing; the invasion would start in March. It would have been a hit much--in money, materiel, and mental concentration--to start mobilizing for northeast Asia, too. In January, a senior administration official told The New York Times, "President Bush does not want to distract international attention from Iraq."

In short, Bush took no serious military action because, in a sense, he couldn't. And he took no serious diplomatic action because he didn't want to. In April, in the flush of the U.S. military's lightning victory over the Iraqi army and the toppling of Saddam Hussein (or at least his statues), Rumsfeld wrote a memo to Bush, calling for "regime change" as a policy toward North Korea. Bush seemed to agree. In a public speech in May, the president said, as if he were addressing Kim Jong-il, "You're hungry and you can't eat plutonium."