Frank Gaffney: We Ignored Our Nuclear Arsenal While North Korea Developed Theirs
by JOHN HAYWARD
BreitBart.com
9 Aug 2017
Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney joined SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam on Wednesday’s Breitbart News Daily to discuss the North Korean nuclear crisis.
“There’s a lot of history here, and most of it’s pretty ugly,” Gaffney responded when Kassam asked him to trace the origins of the nuclear standoff.
“I think, basically, since the end of the Korean War, we’ve had a succession of administrations – Republican and Democratic – who have faced a very unhappy reality, Raheem,” Gaffney said. “And that is the massive, if uneven, shall we say, North Korean military … so closely positioned at the Demilitarized Zone to Seoul, the capital of South Korea, that at will, from a standing start, they could essentially devastate the 24 or so million people who live in and around that capital city.”
“It has checked a lot of options that might otherwise have been contemplated,” he continued. “That became more of a problem as the regime of first Kim Il-sung and his successors, most recently Kim Jong-un, proceeded to build up the infrastructure and, ultimately, the elements of a nuclear weapons program.”
“I think there’s no question that a horrible turning point in all of this was the 1994 framework agreement in which the United States – on behalf of a lot of others, let’s be clear – persuaded itself that it was negotiating the North Korean regime out of its nuclear weapons ambitions,” Gaffney said on the question of President Bill Clinton’s culpability in the crisis.
“It was, I think, clear to most sensible people at the time, and certainly has been in the years since, that wasn’t so. And so, in fact, we began a process of indulging ourselves and indulging the North Koreans in what has now metastasized into a threat that I believe is not just to Guam, but to the United States itself,” he concluded, referring to North Korea’s threat Tuesday evening to launch a missile attack on the U.S. military base on the island of Guam.
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