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North Korea: White House May Accept North Korean Nukes The White House is prepared to accept that it cannot stop North Korea from becoming a nuclear state and is now seeking ways to contain Pyongyang’s potential nuclear stockpile, the Los Angeles Times reported today (see GSN, March 4). The Bush administration is “preparing people up here for a de facto, if not declared, North Korean nuclear state and saying that this is something we can deal with through isolation, sanctions, deterrence and national missile defense,” said a Senate staff member familiar with White House briefings on Capitol Hill. Administration officials, the staff member said, “are trying to prevent Congress from leaping in alarm and either calling for pre-emptive military actions, which they don’t think offers them good options, or criticizing them for being surprised by the North becoming a nuclear power on their watch.” A senior Bush administration official denied that the White House has accepted a nuclear Pyongyang as an inevitable outcome. “Resigned? Throwing up our hands? Working our how to accept them as a nuclear power? No, that’s not what we’re doing,” the official said. A statement from Senator Joseph Biden (D-Del.) said that the reports, if accurate, are “disturbing.” “I’m amazed that we would sit back and let North Korea become a plutonium factory churning out the world’s most dangerous material and possibly selling it to the highest bidder,” Biden said. “We need to treat this problem for what it is — a crisis — and listen to our allies who say we can still head it off if we just sit down and talk” to Pyongyang, Biden said (Sonni Efron, Los Angeles Times, March 5). Several U.S. allies in the region have apparently reached the conclusion that a nuclear North Korea is inevitable, the Washington Post reported. South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, sent a message to Washington that Seoul would prefer a nuclear North Korea to the disorder that would follow collapse of Kim Jong Il’s regime, according to the Post. In Japan, some lawmakers agree that the nuclear process cannot be stopped. “We need to be debating how to live with North Korea, with or without nuclear weapons,” said Taro Kono, a member of the ruling party (Struck/Kessler, Washington Post, March 5). U.S. Sends Bombers The Pentagon, meanwhile, announced yesterday it plans to send two dozen long-range bombers to Guam, putting them within easy striking distance of North Korea, the New York Times reported. The order was issued before an encounter Saturday between a U.S. spy plane and four North Korean fighter jets (Sanger/Shanker, New York Times, March 5). The Pentagon has currently suspended surveillance flights to the area where the incident occurred, USA Today reported today. Defense officials are “reviewing what happened and deciding what to continue,” said a senior administration official (Barbara Slavin, USA Today, March 5).
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