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Interview With Former Defense Secretary William Perry
Aired July 17, 2003 - 15:19 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JUDY WOODRUFF, CNN ANCHOR: With so much of the attention in the U.S. focused now on Iraq and the Middle East, former Clinton Defense Secretary William Perry has reached some troubling conclusions about the potential nuclear threat posed by North Korea.
William Perry is with me now to talk about that and perhaps some other issues.
Thank you for being with us.
WILLIAM PERRY, FORMER DEFENSE SECRETARY: Good to be here, Judy.
WOODRUFF: It wasn't so very long ago that you were saying the situation on the Korean Peninsula, controllable. Now, however, you gave an interview to "The Washington Post" just two days ago, quoted two days ago as saying, it's gotten so bad that you fear that the Koreans are now -- North Koreans -- are in a position to put nuclear weapons into American cities. What changed?
PERRY: Well, just a few days ago, the North Koreans announced that they were finishing the reprocessing of their fuel at their nuclear facility and that they intended to make nuclear weapons with it and that they had restarted their reactors.
If all of that is true, then, by the end of the year, they will have six to eight nuclear weapons. They will be in serial production of nuclear weapons, five to 10 a year next year. They will probably test, before the year is out. And they will probably, in my judgment, be selling some of this material, just as they did their missile material. They cannot afford -- they're in a desperate economic condition. They cannot afford a program like this.
WOODRUFF: How did the situation get to this point, because it wasn't there a few months ago? You and others were saying, this can be worked out. You point a finger at the Bush administration. You say you don't even -- can't even figure out what their policy has been.
PERRY: I point a finger, first of all, at the North Koreans. The North Koreans, since the mid-'80s, have been pushing for a nuclear weapon program. The first Bush administration successfully curtailed that by getting -- with assistance from the Soviet Union, getting them to join the Nonproliferation Treaty and allow the international inspectors in.
But then they made a second try in 1994 during the Clinton administration. We almost went to war at that time. It was a very serious situation. I was looking at deployment orders for sending tens of thousands more troops to South Korea. That was a very dangerous situation. That was stopped by an agreement. But the agreement was only reached because, first of all, we were willing to talk with the North Koreans. And, secondly, we put quite a bit of pressure on what you call coercive diplomacy.
That stopped them at that stage. If we had not had that agreement, they would have 50 to 100 nuclear weapons now. But they have never given up that aspirations. They're back to it again now.
WOODRUFF: And what they have done is, they've said: We want to talk directly to the U.S. We want this to be a small conversation with just a few parties. The U.S., the Bush administration, has said, we want five countries, other countries in the region, South Korea, Japan and so forth.
Now, we gather, there's a Chinese official coming to Washington this week who will bring a proposal from the North Koreans for some sort of compromise. Do you have a sense of whether that's going to make any difference?
PERRY: Well, I certainly welcome the active participation of the Chinese, since they could be quite constructive.
But this problem is so serious to American security that we cannot outsource our diplomacy. We have to be directly involved with the North Koreans on this. So I think, basically, from the American point of view, we have three alternatives. We can simply accept a nuclear program with many nuclear weapons in North Korea and the possibility they'll sell them to other people. And I think that's unacceptable.
The second alternative is to go to war with them to stop it, to change the regime. And when you consider how horrible that war could be, that's unacceptable. That leads you to the third alternative. The only reason we should be willing to negotiate with the North Koreans is because the other two alternatives are so terrible.
WOODRUFF: And the Bush administration policy has been not to negotiate directly.
PERRY: They've apparently not been willing to negotiate to this point. I'm hoping that this development with the Chinese is indicative of, perhaps, a change in view. And I would encourage that change in view.
Nobody likes the prospect of having to negotiate with the North Koreans. Just as I said, concerning the alternatives, it seems like the best of a set of bad alternatives.
WOODRUFF: I saw an administration...
PERRY: I would say one thing, though, that if we're negotiating with them, we should insist, as a prior condition, as the Clinton administration insisted, that, while we're talking, they freeze all of their nuclear activities and allow international inspectors in to verify that. I mean, we should not trust them at all. We should insist on that kind of an agreement.
WOODRUFF: Are you saying that you believe the North Koreans would actually go through with some sort of hostile move, despite everything that we believe the North Koreans -- despite the fact that they need economic aide, they need to deal with the rest of the world? Is that what you're saying?
PERRY: I think they have gone through a move which we consider hostile, which is processing this fuel and announcing they're going to build nuclear weapons. That is a highly hostile act. And they've already done that. What we need to do at this time is stop that from becoming a reality, stop those nuclear weapons from actually being built. That should be, I think, our highest priority.
WOODRUFF: And you're saying it hasn't been?
PERRY: If it is, I haven't seen the action manifested, because this crisis arose last October. And, at that time, I believe we should have set what diplomats call a red line about the reprocessing, telling the North Koreans they could not reprocess. That's what the Clinton administration did in 1994.
We made it clear to the North Koreans that that was a hostile act and we would react very strongly to that. And that was not done then, and so now we're faced with the fact that the processing is, in fact, finished, they say. So they are very close to having nuclear weapons. Each month we delay solving this problem, it gets harder to solve.
WOODRUFF: A grim assessment from William Perry, former secretary of defense. We thank you very much for coming by to talk to us.
PERRY: Thank you, Judy. Good to talk to you.
WOODRUFF: We appreciate it. Thank you. And we'll be talking to you again, I know.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
Aired July 17, 2003 - 15:19 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JUDY WOODRUFF, CNN ANCHOR: With so much of the attention in the U.S. focused now on Iraq and the Middle East, former Clinton Defense Secretary William Perry has reached some troubling conclusions about the potential nuclear threat posed by North Korea.
William Perry is with me now to talk about that and perhaps some other issues.
Thank you for being with us.
WILLIAM PERRY, FORMER DEFENSE SECRETARY: Good to be here, Judy.
WOODRUFF: It wasn't so very long ago that you were saying the situation on the Korean Peninsula, controllable. Now, however, you gave an interview to "The Washington Post" just two days ago, quoted two days ago as saying, it's gotten so bad that you fear that the Koreans are now -- North Koreans -- are in a position to put nuclear weapons into American cities. What changed?
PERRY: Well, just a few days ago, the North Koreans announced that they were finishing the reprocessing of their fuel at their nuclear facility and that they intended to make nuclear weapons with it and that they had restarted their reactors.
If all of that is true, then, by the end of the year, they will have six to eight nuclear weapons. They will be in serial production of nuclear weapons, five to 10 a year next year. They will probably test, before the year is out. And they will probably, in my judgment, be selling some of this material, just as they did their missile material. They cannot afford -- they're in a desperate economic condition. They cannot afford a program like this.
WOODRUFF: How did the situation get to this point, because it wasn't there a few months ago? You and others were saying, this can be worked out. You point a finger at the Bush administration. You say you don't even -- can't even figure out what their policy has been.
PERRY: I point a finger, first of all, at the North Koreans. The North Koreans, since the mid-'80s, have been pushing for a nuclear weapon program. The first Bush administration successfully curtailed that by getting -- with assistance from the Soviet Union, getting them to join the Nonproliferation Treaty and allow the international inspectors in.
But then they made a second try in 1994 during the Clinton administration. We almost went to war at that time. It was a very serious situation. I was looking at deployment orders for sending tens of thousands more troops to South Korea. That was a very dangerous situation. That was stopped by an agreement. But the agreement was only reached because, first of all, we were willing to talk with the North Koreans. And, secondly, we put quite a bit of pressure on what you call coercive diplomacy.
That stopped them at that stage. If we had not had that agreement, they would have 50 to 100 nuclear weapons now. But they have never given up that aspirations. They're back to it again now.
WOODRUFF: And what they have done is, they've said: We want to talk directly to the U.S. We want this to be a small conversation with just a few parties. The U.S., the Bush administration, has said, we want five countries, other countries in the region, South Korea, Japan and so forth.
Now, we gather, there's a Chinese official coming to Washington this week who will bring a proposal from the North Koreans for some sort of compromise. Do you have a sense of whether that's going to make any difference?
PERRY: Well, I certainly welcome the active participation of the Chinese, since they could be quite constructive.
But this problem is so serious to American security that we cannot outsource our diplomacy. We have to be directly involved with the North Koreans on this. So I think, basically, from the American point of view, we have three alternatives. We can simply accept a nuclear program with many nuclear weapons in North Korea and the possibility they'll sell them to other people. And I think that's unacceptable.
The second alternative is to go to war with them to stop it, to change the regime. And when you consider how horrible that war could be, that's unacceptable. That leads you to the third alternative. The only reason we should be willing to negotiate with the North Koreans is because the other two alternatives are so terrible.
WOODRUFF: And the Bush administration policy has been not to negotiate directly.
PERRY: They've apparently not been willing to negotiate to this point. I'm hoping that this development with the Chinese is indicative of, perhaps, a change in view. And I would encourage that change in view.
Nobody likes the prospect of having to negotiate with the North Koreans. Just as I said, concerning the alternatives, it seems like the best of a set of bad alternatives.
WOODRUFF: I saw an administration...
PERRY: I would say one thing, though, that if we're negotiating with them, we should insist, as a prior condition, as the Clinton administration insisted, that, while we're talking, they freeze all of their nuclear activities and allow international inspectors in to verify that. I mean, we should not trust them at all. We should insist on that kind of an agreement.
WOODRUFF: Are you saying that you believe the North Koreans would actually go through with some sort of hostile move, despite everything that we believe the North Koreans -- despite the fact that they need economic aide, they need to deal with the rest of the world? Is that what you're saying?
PERRY: I think they have gone through a move which we consider hostile, which is processing this fuel and announcing they're going to build nuclear weapons. That is a highly hostile act. And they've already done that. What we need to do at this time is stop that from becoming a reality, stop those nuclear weapons from actually being built. That should be, I think, our highest priority.
WOODRUFF: And you're saying it hasn't been?
PERRY: If it is, I haven't seen the action manifested, because this crisis arose last October. And, at that time, I believe we should have set what diplomats call a red line about the reprocessing, telling the North Koreans they could not reprocess. That's what the Clinton administration did in 1994.
We made it clear to the North Koreans that that was a hostile act and we would react very strongly to that. And that was not done then, and so now we're faced with the fact that the processing is, in fact, finished, they say. So they are very close to having nuclear weapons. Each month we delay solving this problem, it gets harder to solve.
WOODRUFF: A grim assessment from William Perry, former secretary of defense. We thank you very much for coming by to talk to us.
PERRY: Thank you, Judy. Good to talk to you.
WOODRUFF: We appreciate it. Thank you. And we'll be talking to you again, I know.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
