WASHINGTON: Former US president Bill Clinton’s administration nearly went to war with North Korea in 1994 to stop it from acquiring plutonium-based nuclear weapons, two former US defence officials said on Sunday.

In a commentary published in The Washington Post, William Perry and Ashton Carter, respectively defence secretary and assistant defence secretary in the Clinton White House in 1994, said they both readied plans for “striking North Korea’s nuclear facilities and for mobilizing hundreds of thousands of American troops for the war that probably would have followed.”

“The two of us spent much of the first half of 1994 preparing for war on the Korean peninsula. North Korea had ejected the international inspectors at its nuclear reactor facility at Yongbyon and began steps that would have led in a few months to the extraction of enough plutonium to build about six nuclear bombs,” they noted.

They said they prepared a detailed plan to attack the Yongbyon reactor with precision-guided bombs.

“We were highly confident that it could be destroyed without causing a meltdown that would release radioactivity into the air,” they added.

That crisis was resolved peacefully with the 1994 so-called “Framework Agreement” under which Pyongyang agreed to freeze its nuclear weapons programme in exchange for two light-water reactors as well as fuel oil for heating and electricity production.—AFP