Word: plutonium
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...during his presidential campaign, and has signaled since assuming office, that he's not averse to having the U.S. talk directly with the North. The fact that the North has been typically ornery of late - possibly crossing into Seoul's territorial waters, defiantly announcing that it's still reprocessing plutonium - may just be Kim Jong Il's way of getting ready to talk...
...incident came a week after Pyongyang said it was continuing to produce weapons-grade plutonium and just before an expected U.S. decision to restart talks with Pyongyang, under the auspices of the Chinese, about the North's nuclear program. The combination of the attack and Pyongyang's defiant announcement that it is still reprocessing plutonium may seem like aberrant behavior on what may be the eve of the North's re-engagement with the outside world. But for Pyongyang, it's more like standard operating procedure. "Unpredictable surprises are the strength of North Korea," says Jeung Young-tae, a senior...
...food aid can work, in return for verifiable steps toward an eventual nuclear stand-down. There is, however, one enormous material fact on the ground that has changed since the North first agreed to stop developing nukes in 1994: it now has several nuclear weapons, made via its plutonium program in interim years, and recently admitted that it's close to having a bomb triggered by highly enriched uranium as well. (Indeed, North Korean refugee groups in Seoul have recently been circulating reports - impossible to verify, of course - that the North plans a uranium bomb test this autumn.) The Administration...
...would never return to the six-party talks and then earlier this year tested, sequentially, a second nuclear bomb and a long-range missile, both in express defiance of United Nations Security Council resolutions. The revelation that the North has a uranium-enrichment program (in addition to a plutonium program, which has been the focus of most of the diplomatic effort in recent years) and its assertion that the program is in its last stage now makes the next phase of diplomatic engagement that much more difficult...
...goal is to get North Korea to give up all its nuclear weapons and the ability to make them, the outside world has to convince Pyongyang to get rid of both an old plutonium project as well as the uranium program - which had become the stuff of bitter controversy during the presidency of George W. Bush. Career State Department officials were hesitant to confront the North with the intelligence in the fall of 2002 that there was a program for highly enriched uranium (HEU), while Bush Administration officials, such as John Bolton - one of the so-called neocons, then serving...