06/04/2002
EDITORIAL NUMBER=0-09924

NORTH KOREA AND TERRORISM

North Korea is one of seven countries listed by the U.S. as a state sponsor of terrorism. It is also one of three countries that, with their terrorist allies, have been singled out by President George W. Bush as constituting an axis of evil. But as President Bush has said, "The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons."

North Korea is one of the world’s dangerous regimes. As U.S. Under Secretary of State John Bolton pointed out, "North Korea has a dedicated, national-level effort to achieve a biological weapons capacity and has developed and produced, and may have weaponized, biological weapons agents. Despite the fact that its citizens are starving," said Mr. Bolton, "the leadership in Pyongyang has spent large sums of money to acquire the resources, including a biotechnology infrastructure, capable of producing infectious agents, toxins, and other crude biological weapons. It has a variety of means at its disposal for delivering these deadly weapons."

North Korea is also dangerous because, as U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said, it is "actively helping. . .the terrorist states. . .develop their ballistic missile programs." And as the U.S. State Department points out in its latest report on "Patterns of Global Terrorism," some evidence suggests that North Korea may have sold small arms to terrorist groups in 2001.

After the September 11^th attacks on the United States, North Korea signed the United Nations Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism. But North Korea did not take substantial steps to cooperate in efforts to combat terrorism. In particular, it did not respond to requests for information on how it is implementing relevant U-N Security Council resolutions. It did not report any efforts to prevent or suppress the financing of terrorist acts, as called for in U-N Security Council Resolution 1373.

North Korea is a source of anxiety for its neighbors as well as the rest of the world. North Korea must cease its export of ballistic missiles and other weapons to states that support terrorism. North Korea must also take actions to demonstrate that it has ended its support for terrorism and terrorist groups.