This paper intends to reveal the truth of the alleged North Korean HEUP (highly
enriched uranium program) that spawned the current nuclear crisis, and
has greatly affected the contemporary history of the Korean peninsula. The
paper finds that what North Korea had in October 2002 was not an HEUP,
and posed no serious and imminent threat to the security of the United States,
thereby providing no rationale to scrap the Agreed Framework. The paper suggests
that North Korea should be condemned for its stalling behavior during
October 2002, but argues that if the Bush administration had been more willing
to make efforts to remove whatever equipment the North had, the second
nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula would not have occurred, and North
Korean nuclear capabilities would not have increased as they have. Most
importantly, this paper maintains, the Bold Approach, the Bush administration’s
version of the Perry Process, might have succeeded, thereby, bringing
about a solution to the “peninsula problem” for the Koreas and the rest of the
world.