The chairman of the House Policy Committee released a bipartisan
letter to President Bush February 13 urging the president to cancel
the previous administration's plans to supply nuclear technology to
North Korea.

Americans cannot help the people of North Korea by sending their
government materials giving it "blackmail power" over the United
States, according to Representative Christopher Cox (Republican of
California).

Following is the text of a press release from the House Policy
Committee:

(begin text)

Policy Chairman Urges End to Nuclear Subsidies for North Korea

Washington (Wednesday, (February 13, 2002) -- The House Policy
Chairman Christopher Cox (R-CA) released a bipartisan letter today
urging President Bush to cancel Clinton administration plans to supply
nuclear technology to Stalinist North Korea.

Chairman Cox issued the following statement:

"One day after President Bush appointed our colleague, Tony Hall
(D-OH), United States Ambassador for United Nations food programs, I'm
pleased to join another conscientious Democrat, Ed Markey (MA), and
the chairman emeritus of the International Relations Committee, Ben
Gilman (R-NY), in support of a responsible nonproliferation policy
toward North Korea.

Tony, Ben, Ed, and I have worked for at least a decade to bring more
attention to the plight of the people of North Korea -- the most
direct victims of the cruel Kim Jon Il dictatorship. President Bush's
upcoming visit to Tokyo, Seoul, and Beijing will highlight both the
threat that the government of North Korea poses to its neighbors in
Asia and around the world, and the cruelty that the government of
North Korea shows its own people. Our policy must consider boy
Pyongyang's internal cruelty and its external belligerence.

North Korea is the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid in the
Asia-Pacific region. Through the United Nation's World Food Program,
U.S. taxpayers pay for two-thirds of all food donations to Kim Jon
Il's government. We supply three-quarters of the donated oil to supply
heat and electricity in North Korea.

Supplementing this largesse with plutonium is not only unnecessary,
but counterproductive: doing so gives Kim Jong Il more political and
military power.

It does nothing to help Koreans, especially considering that there are
less expensive, more efficient, and more readily available means to
generate electricity in North Korea.

Ambassador-designate Hall noted our policy challenge during a recent
visit to North Korea, when he said this: 'The continuing crisis is
most telling in the lives of Korean children. On paper, they are the
best off because they get full rations from the United Nations' World
Food Program. But in reality, nurseries are overflowing with
orphans.... Without soap, hot water, heat, or medicine, most were
dirty, coughing, and sniffling. At lunch, they gulped their milk
without taking a breath and came back hungrily for seconds.'

Just last week, the Associated Press reported yet another story of how
Kim Jon Il has diverted food aid from his people to his million-man
army. According to the AP, a former bodyguard of Kim Jon Il said much
of the food aid is being piled in warehouses for use as reserve food
for war.

Meanwhile, the World Food Program reported February 8 that two million
children in North Korea under age five may die of hunger.

Can we be confident that a dictatorship that permits its own children
to suffer so miserably while desperately maintaining a completely
unnecessary arm with stolen food aid would hesitate to use nuclear
blackmail against those abroad who wish to free its subjects? Even
before President Bush was inaugurated, North Korea's state-run media
threatened the Untied States in the late days of the Clinton
administration. After years of U.S. aid to Kim Jon Il's government,
totaling hundreds of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars, North Korea
threatened to launch a 'suicidal attack to plunge the damned U.S.
territory into a sea of flame.'

If this isn't evil, I don't know what is.

We cannot help the people of North Korea by sending their dictator
materials giving him the sort of blackmail power President Gorbachev
was sane enough not to exercise as his state collapsed. By preventing
Kim Jon Il form acquiring nuclear materials before he becomes even
more belligerent, perhaps we can prevent war. We certainly should not
supply him with nuclear technology and materials that will make war
both more likely and more deadly.

(end text)

Sources

• Washington File