U.S. officials said they have no plans to attack North Korea over the deepening nuclear crisis but haven’t ruled out using force to make the “Axis of Evil” member give up its plans to build atomic-bomb plutonium.
Secretary of State Colin Powell made the rounds yesterday on the TV talk shows to ratchet down the rhetoric in the war of words with the rogue state.
“I don’t want to create a sense of crisis or that we’re on the brink of war, because I don’t believe we are,” Powell said on ABC’s “This Week.”
“Military action is always an option, but it is not an option that is in the forefront to our thinking right now, because it doesn’t seem necessary or appropriate.”
Powell told “Meet the Press” on NBC the United States is “not planning a pre-emptive strike.”
Nuclear inspectors from the United Nations are expected to quit North Korea tomorrow after that country announced it was reneging on its international nuclear agreements and firing up a deactivated facility in Yongbyon for making weapons-grade plutonium.
North Korea has insisted the plant will not be used for arms production but to generate electricity.
Powell said the plant would not create enough power to make a difference in North Korea’s energy crisis.
An editorial in the North Korean state-run newspaper said the Pyongyang government, a totalitarian remnant of the Cold War, wants to settle the issue in a “peaceful way.”
The dictatorship demanded a sit-down with U.S. diplomats and a non-aggression pact from the United States as part of a deal to address the nuclear crisis.
“We can’t appease them,” Powell said on “This Week.”
“The wrong lessons will be drawn from us stepping forward and saying, ‘We are so concerned and afraid of this that we will do whatever it takes, whatever you ask us.'”
Roh Moo-yun, the president-elect of South Korea, said Friday that “if the North Korean moves raise concern in South Korea, the role of the South Korean government and its new leaders will be limited and there could be a negative impact on ongoing inter-Korean exchanges.” With Post Wire Services