Word: plutonium
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...Instead, the U.S. was reduced last month to promising North Korea an "early harvest" in return for good behavior. This concept called for the U.S. to pledge economic aid (food, oil) and other benefits (including, perhaps, diplomatic recognition) in return for a provisional North Korean freeze of its plutonium facilities and a readmission of nuclear inspectors. In other words, the Bush Administration was proffering a zero-penalty return to the previous nuclear deals Pyongyang had flagrantly broken-but with additional goodies, and a provisional free pass for any nukes produced since 2002. With this overture, the Bush team embraced...
...first scenario could be entitled Poor, Misunderstood, Rational North Korea: This narrative sees virtually everything the North has done since signing the so-called "Agreed Framework" nuclear deal with the Clinton Administration in 1994 as understandable - even predictable. Pyongyang signed away its plutonium reprocessing plant and in return was supposed to get a bunch of things in return, including diplomatic recognition from the United States, and two light water reactors for electric power generation from a U.S.-Japanese-South Korean?led consortium. But not much was delivered: The first of the reactors was supposed to have been finished...
...Feeling that it had been deceived, the North began a secret uranium enrichment program that violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the '94 deal. Confronted with evidence of this in October 2002, Pyongyang angrily announced it was restarting its plutonium-based nuke program, which it had frozen under the Agreed Framework, and expelled inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. Then, having been been named to President Bush's "Axis of Evil," and having watched the Bush Administration knock off Iraq, Kim Jong-il did the only thing he could do to guarantee no one would mess with...
...this scenario, the North will refuse to dismantle its plutonium program until the previously promised light-water reactors are actually constructed. The Bush Administration insists, by contrast, that Pyongyang must begin to dismantle the plutonium facilities "at an early stage...
...there any evidence that the U.S. is in any rush to clarify its ambiguous stance on the shadowy group. Sure, Ahmadinejad is a worrying threat to the international community, and he proved this week that enriching plutonium isn't the only way he has to thumb his nose at it. But the debacle of U.S. policy in Iraq and elsewhere in the region may have put paid to the notion that the enemy of my enemy is my friend...