US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned Saturday that protracted diplomatic negotiations were giving North Korea time to develop their nuclear weapons; raising the risk they would fall into terrorist hands. "It seems to me they have demonstrated a willingness to export anything," Rumsfeld told an international gathering here of security experts and government officials. "And to the extent they have the capability they have indicated they have, reasonable people in the world would have to assume they would be willing to sell or use most of those capabilities."
Rumsfeld said Washington and other parties to the talks with North Korea were working hard to get Pyongyang to dismantle its nuclear weapons program, with a third-round of negotiations expected to be held in Beijing this month. "Needless to say time works to the advantage of North Korea," he said. "Assuming their behaviour is to continue their programs, the longer it takes the more dangerous presumably their capabilities would become." In a question and answer session at the Asia Security Conference, Rumsfeld was asked about concerns that North Korea was capable of smuggling a radiological bomb or even a nuclear weapon into the United States. He said the US was "imperfectly" arranged to prevent such threats and that countries needed to work more closely on such problems. "I would submit the likelihood of terrorist networks or terrorist states getting their hands on these increasingly powerful weapons and using them is growing every year," he said. "Which is why the counter-proliferation initiative is so important, countries simply must cooperate together because there is simply no way a single country can effectively deal with the problem of proliferation." Rumsfeld said about 50 countries had expressed support for the Proliferation Security Initiative, a US-sponsored effort to increase global maritime security to prevent smuggling of weapons of mass destruction.
Rumsfeld admitted that the United States had done a poor job in attacking the sources of terrorism, and stemming the flow of young Muslim extremists trained to "work the seams, the shadows and the caves." "I am certain we have not been successful," he said, adding, "The world has a problem." On Iraq, he said the United States was engaged in a test of wills and that if it failed, the alternative was civil war, or ethnic cleansing, a break-up of the country, or the emergence of another Saddam Hussein "junior version." Rumsfeld was questioned about the withdrawal of US ground troops from South Korea for duty in Iraq, and whether the reduction in force levels should have been used as leverage to gain similar reductions in North Korean forces. "I think that you’ll find the North Koreans will not believe there’s been a weakening of the deterrent," Rumsfeld responded. |