Joe Conason interviews the Big Dog in Salon:

The Bush administration has sharply criticized the deal you made with North Korea as a failure, because it was revealed that they have begun to clandestinely reprocess uranium and built at least a couple of nuclear weapons. What is your response to that criticism? How should the United States deal with North Korea?

I disagree with that, and if you look at the press reports from the past few days it seems that the Bush administration is coming back to our policy again. Let’s get the facts out first. When I became president, it became obvious that North Korea was moving toward the capacity to build several nuclear weapons a year … I was determined not to let that happen. We had a very tense set of negotiations with North Korea, which got quite tense when they kicked the U.N. inspectors out … Eventually, we made a deal after we told them that under no circumstances would we allow them the capacity to make several nuclear weapons a year. So the deal we made was that we, along with the Japanese, South Koreans, and other interested parties, would provide them with food and [energy aid] if they would put all the nuclear fuel rods in a place where they could be inspected. That agreement worked and on its own terms was not violated. In 1998 we reached an agreement where they agreed to stop testing their long-range missiles. In 2000, we nearly reached an agreement where they nearly agreed to stop producing and selling those missiles.

After I left office, the Bush administration discovered, and briefed me about it, that in 1998 the North Koreans had started a much smaller program in a lab with highly enriched uranium — enough to produce perhaps a weapon or two. Does that mean my policy was a failure? No, because if we hadn’t stopped their reactor program [in 1994], they could have been producing not one or two nuclear weapons but maybe six to 10 a year. Colin Powell said they would have had dozens of weapons by this time, and the State Department in the Bush administration has supported our Korea policy.

What should be done now? North Korea wants three things. They don’t want to disappear. They want to eat and stay warm, and they can’t grow food or afford power. And they want to be treated as an important country that deals with the U.S. and other countries in their region. They want some sort of official recognition from us.

They’re not going to bomb South Korea or Japan. The danger is that a country that builds world-class bombs but can’t feed itself or stay warm will sell them … What we need to try to do is to get an agreement, with the Chinese, the Russians, the Japanese and the South Koreans, where they finally end all those nuclear and missile programs, and we arrange for them to get food and energy. And we continue to support the rapprochement between North and South Korea. Now it looks to me as if the Bush administration is in the right place and moving in the right direction.