North Korea Nuke crisis: made in the U.S.A.

North Korea's defiant announcement that it had conducted an atomic bomb test on October 9, and that it would continue to carry out additional tests despite global condemnation, should have surprised no one. The fact that the communist regime in Pyongyang has been aggressively building a nuclear weapons program over the past two decades is no secret. What seems to be forgotten is that much of North Korea's weapons program that is now causing such world concern has been built with aid provided first by the Clinton administration and then by the Bush administration.

In 1994, President Clinton announced a great diplomatic breakthrough, his so-called Agreed Framework, with Communist North Korea. Under the new compact, brokered by former President Jimmy Carter, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il promised to freeze his nuclear program in return for two light-water nuclear reactors and 500,000 tons of heavy fuel oil annually from the United States. This was nuclear extortion, plain and simple, but President Clinton announced that this treacherous agreement was "good for the United States, good for our allies, and good for the safety of the entire world." Clinton's ...