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"You read my mind. Just this morning, I was thinking since Clintons offered North Korea and Iran the same deal ($1bn for nuclear reactors) and since they did not observe whether compliance was occurring or not, is it possible that they thought that North Korea and Iran should have nukes?"

I copied these off of another FR NK thread.

1993 : (DISASTEROUS CLINTON ADMINISTRATION TEST BAN TREATY POLICY MAKES NUCLEAR INFORMATION PUBLIC, WOULD RESULT IN PROLIFERATION OF NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGY - See ENERGY DEPARTMENT "OPENNESS INITIATIVE," HAZEL O'LEARY ) Back in 1993, when the terrors of the Cold War were still fresh, the administration decided that the best way to keep the nuclear arms race from heating up again was to get the world's nations to sign a test-ban treaty. The idea was that even if a country knew how to make a bomb, it couldn't perfect new ones and build up advanced forces without physically testing new designs. So development of new weapons would be frozen, ending the vicious spiral of nuclear move and countermove.

Releasing many of America's nuclear secrets was seen as an essential part of this strategy, since it would signal a new global order in which nuclear know-how was suddenly and irreparably devalued and real security would lie in the collective knowledge that nobody was able to push weaponry beyond the known boundaries.

What had been gold would become dross, and the atom would lose power and prestige. Driven by such logic, the administration made public masses of generalities about nuclear arms, even as specific weapon designs were kept secret.

... Since 1993, officials say, the Energy Department's "openness initiative" has released at least 178 categories of atom secrets. By contrast, the 1980s saw two such actions. The unveilings have included no details of specific weapons, like the W-88, a compact design Chinese spies are suspected of having stolen from the weapons lab at Los Alamos, N.M. But they include a slew of general secrets. ... the disclosures... such things as how atom bombs can be boosted in power, key steps in making hydrogen bombs, the minimum amount (8.8 pounds) of plutonium or uranium fuel needed for an atom bomb and the maximum time it takes an exploding atomic bomb to ignite an H-bomb's hydrogen fuel (100 millionths of a second). No grade-B physicist from any university could figure this stuff. It took decades of experience gained at a cost of more than $400 billion.

The release of the secrets started as a high-stakes bet that openness would lessen, not increase, the world's vulnerability to nuclear arms and war. - "Spying Isn't the Only Way to Learn About Nukes," By WILLIAM J. BROAD, the New York Times, May 30, 1999.