🚀 go-pugleaf

The last time I checked ABB was an Electric Engineering support Company.
So the way I read this news we should go after all the major oil companies
ever time some one makes a Molotov Cocktail from gas they pruchased for
their car?
I think it was a good thing we wanted to help them get the lights on, not
make bombs to kill us.

"No One" <noone@nowhere.com> wrote in message
news:SCJua.1278$Ly2.167562@cletus.bright.net...
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/korea/article/0,2763,952289,00.html
>
> The two faces of Rumsfeld
>
> 2000: director of a company which wins $200m contract to sell nuclear
> reactors to North Korea
> 2002: declares North Korea a terrorist state, part of the axis of evil
> and a target for regime change
>
> Randeep Ramesh
> Friday May 9, 2003
> The Guardian
>
> Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, sat on the board of a
> company which three years ago sold two light water nuclear reactors to
> North Korea - a country he now regards as part of the "axis of evil"
> and which has been targeted for regime change by Washington because of
> its efforts to build nuclear weapons.
>
> Mr Rumsfeld was a non-executive director of ABB, a European
> engineering giant based in Zurich, when it won a $200m (�125m)
> contract to provide the design and key components for the reactors.
> The current defence secretary sat on the board from 1990 to 2001,
> earning $190,000 a year. He left to join the Bush administration.
>
> The reactor deal was part of President Bill Clinton's policy of
> persuading the North Korean regime of positively engaging with the
> west.
>
> The sale of the nuclear technology was a high-profile contract. ABB's
> then chief executive, Goran Lindahl, visited North Korea in November
> 1999 to announce ABB's "wide-ranging, long-term cooperation agreement"
> with the communist government.
>
> The company also opened an office in the country's capital, Pyongyang,
> and the deal was signed a year later in 2000. Despite this, Mr
> Rumsfeld's office said that the defence secretary did not "recall it
> being brought before the board at any time".
>
> In a statement to the American magazine Newsweek, his spokeswoman
> Victoria Clarke said that there "was no vote on this". A spokesman for
> ABB told the Guardian yesterday that "board members were informed
> about the project which would deliver systems and equipment for light
> water reactors".
>
> Just months after Mr Rumsfeld took office, President George Bush ended
> the policy of engagement and negotiation pursued by Mr Clinton -
> saying he did not trust North Korea and pulled the plug on diplomacy.
> Pyongyang warned that it would respond by building nuclear missiles. A
> review of American policy was announced and the bilateral
> confidence-building steps, key to Mr Clinton's policy of detente,
> halted.
>
> By January 2002, the Bush administration had placed North Korea in the
> "axis of evil" alongside Iraq and Iran. If there was any doubt about
> how the White House felt about North Korea this was dispelled by Mr
> Bush, who told the Washington Post last year: "I loathe [North Korea's
> leader] Kim Jong-il"
>
> The success of campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have enhanced the
> status of Mr Rumsfeld in Washington. Two years after leaving ABB, Mr
> Rumsfeld now considers North Korea a "terrorist regime ... teetering
> on the verge of collapse" and which was on the verge of becoming a
> proliferator of nuclear weapons. During a bout of diplomatic activity
> over Christmas he warned that the US could fight two wars at once - a
> reference to the forthcoming conflict with Iraq. After Baghdad fell,
> Mr Rumsfeld said Pyongyang should draw the "appropriate lesson".
>
> Critics of the administration's bellicose language on North Korea say
> that the problem was not that Mr Rumsfeld supported the
> Clinton-inspired diplomacy and the ABB deal but that he did not "speak
> up against it". "One could draw the conclusion that economic and
> personal interests took precedent over non- proliferation," said Steve
> LaMontagne, an analyst with the Centre for Arms Control and
> Non-Proliferation in Washington.
>
> Many members of the Bush administration are on record as opposing Mr
> Clinton's plans - saying that weapons-grade nuclear material could be
> extracted from the type of light water reactors that ABB sold. Mr
> Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and the state department's number
> two diplomat, Richard Armitage, both opposed the deal as did the
> Republican presidential candidate, Bob Dole, whose campaign Mr
> Rumsfeld ran and where he also acted as defence adviser. One unnamed
> ABB board director told Fortune magazine that Mr Rumsfeld was involved
> in lobbying his hawkish friends on behalf of ABB.
>
> The Clinton package sought to defuse tensions on the Ko rean peninsula
> by offering supplies of oil and new light water nuclear reactors in
> return for access by inspectors to Pyongyang's atomic facilities and a
> dismantling of its heavy water reactors which produce weapons-grade
> plutonium. Light water reactors are known as "proliferation-resistant"
> but, in the words of one expert, they are not "proliferation-proof".
>
> The type of reactors involved in the ABB deal produce plutonium which
> needs refining before it can be weaponised. One US congressman and
> critic of the North Korean regime described the reactors as "nuclear
> bomb factories". North Korea expelled the inspectors last year and
> withdrew from the nuclear non- proliferation treaty in January at
> about the same time that the Bush administration authorised $3.5m to
> keep ABB's reactor project going.
>
> North Korea is thought to have offered to scrap its nuclear facilities
> and missile pro gramme and to allow international nuclear inspectors
> into the country. But Pyongyang demanded that security guarantees and
> aid from the US must come first.
>
> Mr Bush now insists that he will only negotiate a new deal with
> Pyongyang after the nuclear programme is scrapped. Washington believes
> that offering inducements would reward Pyongyang's "blackmail" and
> encourage other "rogue" states to develop weapons of mass destruction.
>
>
>