Whose nukes?

How many times have you read or heard lately about plans by North Korea and Iran to build nuclear reactors? The Bush administration has made this a major international crisis. You would think that these two countries were doing something outrageous in pursuing nuclear energy.

But the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) and Iran are but two of many countries either seeking to build or expand nuclear energy programs. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, there are at this time 443 operating nuclear power plants in the world. Another 25 are under construction.

The United States has by far the largest number of power plants in operation (104), followed by France (59) and Japan (56). This does not count the reactors in the large U.S. fleet of nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers.

Thirty countries currently generate nuclear power: Argentina, Armenia, Bel gium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Ger many, Hungary, India, Japan, Lithuania, Mexico, Netherlands, Pakistan, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, United Kingdom and the United States.

Fourteen of the above are also planning to build new reactors or reopen older ones. Others considering or in the process of building new reactors are Egypt, Indo nesia, Israel, Turkey and Vietnam—in addition to Iran and the DPRK. (Wikipedia)

The DPRK is surrounded by nuclear powers. Two—the U.S. and Japan—are imperialist countries that invaded Korea and imposed their political and economic domination on the people. South Korea, which was split away from the north by U.S. military occupation after World War II, has 20 nuclear power plants to fuel its economy. The DPRK has a more severe climate and has suffered an acute energy crisis ever since the collapse of the USSR, once a major economic partner.

Agreements betrayed by U.S.

The U.S. for over a decade has aggressively tried to keep the DPRK from advancing its plans to build nuclear power plants. In 1994 an agreement was reached between the DPRK and the Clinton administration that the DPRK would abandon its plans to build graphite reactors and the U.S. would help it build light-water reactors instead—the difference being that LWRs could not produce plutonium, a byproduct of the fission process that can be used in triggering nuclear weapons.

But the U.S. never honored its side of the agreement. The LWRs were never built and agreed shipments of oil to tide the country over its energy crisis arrived only after its worst winter weather.

So the DPRK withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and resumed work on its original reactors.

Under constant threat from the nuclear-armed Pentagon, which continues to occupy South Korea with over 30,000 troops, the DPRK announced a year ago that it had developed nuclear weapons. It declared that what it wanted was a comprehensive agreement that would ban nuclear weapons from the entire Korean peninsula, north and south, and end the U.S. threat of war that has been hanging over the heads of the Korean people for more than half a century. This threat was made even more ominous when President George W. Bush, in a speech preparing the U.S. population for a war against Iraq, also included the DPRK as part of an “axis of evil” to be destroyed.

Last September, it appeared that some progress had been made in the direction of easing the crisis when an agreement on the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula was signed at the end of six-party talks in Beijing involving North and South Korea, China, Russia, the U.S. and Japan. The DPRK Foreign Ministry issued a statement on Sept. 20 that “we will return to the NPT and sign the Safeguards Agreement with the IAEA and comply with it immediately upon the U.S. provision of LWRs, a basis of confidence-building, to us. As already clarified more than once, we will feel no need to keep even a single nuclear weapon if the DPRK-U.S. relations are normalized, bilateral confidence is built and we are not exposed to the U.S. nuclear threat any longer.”

But Washington continues to demand that the DPRK abandon its current nuclear program and allow in inspectors before the U.S. takes any steps toward facilitating the LWRs that North Korea needs to produce energy.

At the same time, Washington and its old foe-turned-ally Japan are trying to further damage the economy of the DPRK, which has been improving in recent years, by imposing sanctions. Claiming this has nothing to do with the nuclear issue, they have put forward a wild story accusing the DPRK of forging currency and dealing in drugs—and have moved to freeze its accounts in foreign banks.

Why is the U.S. capitalist government so hostile to the DPRK? The bottom line is that while North Korea has never done anything to the U.S., it became a prime target of Washington’s expansionist drive into Asia after World War II.

The north has tried hard to build a socialist economy ever since its revolution, led by Korea’s greatest hero, Kim Il Sung. That struggle overthrew the bankers, landlords and merchants in the north—many of whom had been collaborators with Japan during its harsh colonial rule over the Korean people—and eventually established a socialist republic in 1948.

When the revolution looked like it would spread to the south in 1950, the U.S. staged a massive invasion and waged a terrible three-year war that killed millions of Korean people. But it did not succeed in overturning the socialist government in the north—the first defeat for U.S. imperialism in what became known as the Cold War.

Today, the government of the DPRK, led by Kim Jong Il, continues to represent the struggle of the Korean people to maintain a strong defense against imperialist aggression in order to develop their economy and not give in to the dictates of monopoly capitalism, whether from the U.S. or Japan.