Former Irish Attorney General sells nuclear reactor to N. Korea

national | miscellaneous | news report Sunday April 20, 2003 15:53 by Passive

Sunday Indo claim former Irish Attorney General and Donald Rumsfeld sold nuclear reactors to N. Korea in 2000.

FORMER Irish Attorney-
General Peter Sutherland and US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld helped sell nuclear reactors worth $200m to North Korea, the Sunday Independent can reveal.
This weekend, the Stalinist regime of North Korea claimed it was taking steps to manufacture up to eight nuclear missiles from spent nuclear fuel.
The multimillion-dollar reactor deal was struck just a year before President George W Bush branded the reclusive communist state part of an "axis of evil". American nuclear experts warned last week that radioactive components from the reactors could be used to develop powerful nuclear weapons. Now Pyongyang says this is exactly what it intends to do.
Mr Sutherland and Mr Rumsfeld, who work together on several high-level projects, were both board members of a Zurich-based energy company, ABB, which sold two light-water nuclear reactors to the communists in 2000.
The pair simultaneously stepped down from the ABB board a year later when Mr Rumsfeld was drafted into the Bush administration. But Sutherland's connection with the US hawk did not end there Both are members of the elite Bilderberg Group, which former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown was told comprises the "50 people who run the world and 20 hangers-on". Ashdown, who attended an annual meeting of the group in 1989, made it clear that Ireland's only member is not one of the hangers-on. "The show was stolen by Peter Sutherland," he wrote in his diary at the time.
The group, founded by Dutch royal Prince Bernhard, is said to be the closest thing to a transatlantic government that exists. Members include Henry Kissinger, the King and Queen of Spain, and several past and serving presidents and prime ministers.
Mr Sutherland, a failed Fine Gael election candidate, former EU commissioner and current chairman of Goldman Sachs and BP, is a prime mover in the club.
While Mr Rumsfeld has cut all links with ABB, Mr Sutherland continues to serve on the board of a Swedish industrial holding company which has a substantial stake in ABB, worth close to €1bn.
When the Zurich energy firm sold the two 1,000 megawatt reactors to North Korea, it insisted they were "tamper-proof". Asked last week by the Sunday Independent if he really believed this to be the case, Mr Sutherland said: "I have absolutely no idea."
He refused to answer further questions about the deal except to say he had left ABB "several years ago". Mr Sutherland stepped down 25 months ago.
The head of the Non-proliferation Policy Education
Centre in Washington has warned that the reactors are not tamper-proof.
"These reactors are like all reactors; they have the potential to make weapons. So you might end up supplying the worst nuclear violator with the means to acquire the very weapons we're trying to prevent it acquiring," Henry Sokolski said.
On Friday, North Korea issued a statement saying it was in the final stages of reprocessing more than 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods, marking the lowest point in a six-month diplomatic crisis.
The Sutherland/Rumsfeld reactors were fitted with monitoring cameras which provided intelligence to western powers, but the North Koreans started to remove them in December last year. It has not been possible to verify their claims about their growing nuclear capability.
Analysts say the move is designed to raise the stakes in advance of talks about Pyongyang's nuclear programmes that were due to start next week in Beijing.
The statement, issued by the state-run Korean Central News Agency said: "The Iraqi war teaches a lesson that in order to prevent war and defend the security of a country and the sovereignty of a nation it is necessary to have a powerful physical deterrent force only."
North Korea is thought to already have two nuclear missiles. That could increase to 10, thanks to material plundered from nuclear reactors.
As international tension mounts, the US Deputy Secretary of Defence, Paul Wolfowitz, has castigated the international agreement which allowed his boss, Rumsfeld, to supply the Democratic People's Republic of Korea with nuclear equipment. In 1998, Mr Rumsfeld himself used his position as chairman of the Ballistic Missile Threat Commission to warn: "North Korea maintains an active weapons of mass destruction programme, including a nuclear weapons programme." Less than two years later he and Sutherland were openly selling the 'rogue state' $200m worth of nuclear kit.