U.S. taxpayers are financing North Korea's nuclear nightmare

Today. even as North Korea poses one of the greatest threats to American and allied interests anywhere around the globe, the Clinton-Gore Administration has made Kim Jong-II's dictatorship the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid in the Asia-Pacific region. This is an astonishing policy reversal, and it has made payers in th United States the principal financiers of the Stalinist regime's survival.

Unwilling to accept even privately funded nuclear power in the United States, the Clinton-Gore Administration is using U.S. taxpayer dollars to build nuclear reactors for Kim Jong-IL. (They are doing so even though tins risks helping North Korea build nuclear weapons, with plutonium reprocessed from the U.S.-financed reactors.) And Last month, Clinton himself unilaterally and his intention to completely normalize relations with North Korea.

For the entire half century since the Truman Administration, U.S. policy has stood firm against the self-appointed Communist gods Kim II-Sung and his son, Kim Jong-II. To the very last day of the Bush Administration, North Korea received no U.S. aid, subsidies or trade. Thus, Clinton's initiation of U.S. taxpayer subsidies for North Korea, and his plan to completely normalize relations with this bizarre and dangerous Communist country, is a radical break with longstanding American policy.

Escalating North Korean Threat

North Korea is not simply a dictatorship: It is a uniquely monstrous tyr"y that has tormented the Korean people for half a century, that continues to starve men, women and children through man-made famine, and that has created the most completely totalitarian and militarized state in human history.

Nor is it merely a theoretical threat to America. Kim Jong-II's million-man army, which considers itself formally at war with the United States, is building long-range missiles that will enable it to subject American territory to nuclear, biological and chemical blackmail.

A little more than a year ago, without warning, North Korea fired a nuclear-capable ballistic missile 850 miles directly over Japan. This surprise missile launch recklessly jeopardized the safety of the people of Japan. So callous is the North Korean regime to international norms that it lacked the humanity even to give a mariner's alert to ships directly in the missile's splashdown area.

As a result of this stunning action, the world was alerted to a long-range missile capability that few people until then believed North Korea possessed. Since tim Japan-with U.S. suppo t-has been scrambling to deploy a missile defense to protect its citizens and 40,000 American troops from the rapidly escalating North Korean threat.

On Dec. 8, 1998, after four years of Clinton-Gore-directed U.S. foreign aid, North Korean Defense Ministry officials publicly announced they were "ready to annihilate U.S. imperialists:' and said they would "plunge the damned U.S. territory into a sea of flame" (Ms amazing threat is currently posted on North Korea's state run media web site at .)

North Korea is a virulent proliferator of dangerous weapons. It has sold crucial technology to han for the Shahab missile that now threatens U.S. forces across the Middle East, and to Pakistan for the Ghauri missile that in 1998 disrupted the fragile stability of South Asia. Tellingly, North Korea's missile proliferation has dramatically accelerated since the Clinton-Gore Administration began giving the regime U.S. taxpayer support in 1994. There were no known No-dong missile sales abroad until after the United States signed the "Agreed Framework" with North Korea.

Extortionate Demands

When North Korea's nuclear weapons development was first uncovered, Clinton's initial response was uncompromising. The President in November 1993 flatly declared that "North Korea cannot be allowed to develop a nuclear bomb "

The administration, however, swiftly made a hash of this rhetoric by agreeing to pay North Korea in advance for unenforceable promises that it would not develop such weapons. Not surprisingly, those promises have consistently been broken during every succeeding year.

North Korea's nuclear program was to be "Frozen," according to the Clinton-Gore Administration, in exchange far the billions of dollars in U.S.-led foreign aid (including the construction of two nuclear reactors) called for in the 1994 Agreed Framework they negotiated with North Korea. But in sworn testimony before the Congress in 1998, and more recently in its October 1999 report to Congress, the Clinton Gore Administration was compelled to admit that North Korea's nuclear weapons development program actually continues.

When American negotiators first sought to restrain North Korea from new missile sales, North Korea boldly used the opportunity to demand $500 million. Worse yet, the Clinton-Gore Administration agreed to give North Korea $60 million in aid, a claiming this had "no link" to missiles.

When North Korea was asked to reveal a suspected underground nuclear site in the mountains of Kumchang-rione of many sites that is required to be open to inspection under the terms of its 1992 denuclearization agreement with South Korea-North Korea once again demanded, and received, "compensation" from American taxpayers.