Former defense secretary William Perry warned that the United States and North Korea are drifting toward war, perhaps as early as this year, in an increasingly dangerous standoff that also could result in terrorists being able to purchase a North Korean nuclear device and plant it in a U.S. city.
‘I think we are losing control’ of the situation, said Perry, who believes North Korea soon will have enough nuclear warheads to begin exploding them in tests and exporting them to terrorists and other U.S. adversaries. (…)
Only last winter Perry publicly argued that the North Korea problem was controllable. Now, he said, he has grown to doubt that. “It was manageable six months ago if we did the right things,” he said. “But we haven’t done the right things.”
He added: “I have held off public criticism to this point because I had hoped that the administration was going to act on this problem, and that public criticism might be counterproductive. But time is running out, and each month the problem gets more dangerous.” Washington Post
And:
North Korean officials told the Bush administration last week that they had finished producing enough plutonium to make a half-dozen nuclear bombs, and that they intended to move ahead quickly to turn the material into weapons, senior American officials said today.
The new declaration set off a scramble in American intelligence agencies — under fire for their assessment of Iraq’s nuclear capability — to determine if the North Korean government of Kim Jong Il was bluffing or had succeeded in producing the material undetected. NY Times
