N. Korea agrees to give up nuclear program

BEIJING, China (CNN) -- Nearly three years after ordering U.N. nuclear inspectors out of the country, North Korea Monday agreed to give up its entire nuclear program, including weapons, a joint statement from six-party nuclear arms talks in Beijing said.

"We should long ago have been negotiating bilaterally with North Korea...George Bush has run the most arrogant, inept, reckless, and ideological foreign policy in the modern history of our country." - Sen. John Kerry.

"...(T)he President must explain why war with Iraq won't distract us from the more immediate and graver danger posed by North Korea." U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy.

" I don't know whether it's inevitable, no matter what is done from this point on, that North Korea is bound and determined to not only increase their nuclear arsenal but to have a throw weight capacity to be able to put it on top of a missile and send it hurtling across the ocean with a third stage of a Nodong missile. I don't know. I suspect that is it. I don't know that in fact it can be stopped." - U.S. Sen. Joe Biden.

"Our current path leads to one of two bad outcomes: either the United States essentially will acquiesce to the North's serial production of nuclear weapons, or we will find ourselves in a military confrontation with a desperate, nuclear-armed, regime." U.S. Sens Harry Reid, Joe Biden, Carl Levin, John D. Rockefeller IV, in letter to President Bush.

"Here is my biggest concern: North Korea is about to go nuclear on this president's watch, because he refuses to discuss the matter with them." - Howard Dean.

"In this case, however, we demonstrably don't have a plan. Because of that lack of a plan, the fact that the North Koreans are now months away from cranking out nuclear weapons really is a big national security set-back for the United States and its allies in the region. How and why exactly did the US let that happen? Now we're reduced to saying we're willing to accept what we were previously never willing to accept: a nuclear North Korea." - Josh Marshall.

"But the American military may already be in real danger: What threats, exactly, can the United States make against the North Koreans? That John Bolton will yell at them?" - Paul Krugman.

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