False ‘intelligence’ allowed North Korea to aquire nuclear weapons.
There are two major ways to build a ‘nuke’, either with highly enriched Uranium or with Plutonium gained from spent reactor fuel.
In 2002 the U.S. started to claim that North Korea was enriching Uranium for a nuclear bomb program.
North Korea denied the enrichment charges. The dispute led to an end of the ‘agreed framework’, a 1994 contract that provided North Korea with fossil fuel in exchange for it not to develop nuclear weapons.
Based on the allegations of NoKo Uranium enrichment the Bush administration stopped its part of the deal. Retaliating North Korea threw out the IAEA inspectors and started to extract plutonium from the used fuel of its research reactors. In 2006 it detonated a (likely) nuclear device.
Only thereafter did the U.S. restart serious talks to again provide fuel and other incentives in exchange for North Korean denuclearization.
It now turns out, as some had said before, that the whole story about North Korean Uranium enrichment was likely a ‘failure’ of U.S. intelligence. Glenn Kessler writes in the Washington Post:
North Korea is providing evidence to the United States aimed at proving that it never intended to produce highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons, undermining a key U.S. intelligence finding, South Korean and U.S. officials said this week.
[…]
"This is now in the process of being clarified," a senior South Korean official said in an interview. "The North Koreans are now ready to prove that they did not intend to make a uranium-enrichment program by importing some materials."He said North Korea is attempting to show that the materials it imported — including 150 tons of aluminum tubes from Russia in June 2002 — were intended for conventional weapons programs and other dual-use projects, not for weapons of mass destruction.
[…]
Aluminium tubes purchased by Iraq, intended as rocket casings and unfit to be used in centrifuges, were part of the Bush administration false claims about an Iraqi nuclear program.
As we learn now a similar ridiculous claim led to an end of the agreed framework and to a North Korean nuclear device.
.. the tubes acquired by North Korea needed to be cut in half and shaped in order to be used as the outer casings of centrifuges.
A major figure in the U.S. claims of nuclear bomb programs in Iraq, North Korea and Iran is John Bolton. He and his former special assistant Frederick Fleitz, supported by Representative Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), were the key people in providing the false claims.
Currently Bolton and the Wall Street Journal opinion editors are propagandizing an alleged nuclear program in Syria which they claim to be supported by North Korea.
Their aim seems to be to derail the talks in North Korea and to build public ground for an attack on Iran and Syria. As they have been caught in a huge lie again, one hopes that the public will disregard their claims.