Word: testing
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...Nuclear Nightmare Comes True With North Korea claiming a successful nuclear weapons test, its neighbors and the U.S. must figure out how to respond
...North Korea Raises the Stakes Analysis: More tough talk, another provocation. What's behind Pyongyang's threat to test a nuclear weapon...
...North Korea's foreign ministry made the unprecedented announcement Tuesday that the regime would test a nuclear weapon at an unspecified point in the future. The statement cited among Pyongyang's reasons for considering the step the "vicious sanctions and pressure" it said the U.S. was using to "isolate and stifle" North Korea. Those sanctions, intensified in the wake of North Korea's test firing of a long-range missile in July and confirmed in a U.N. Security Council resolution last month, were part of a U.S.- and Japan-led drive to squeeze the regime in Pyongyang to reverse course...
...threat to test a weapon certainly fits with the traditional North Korean game of provocative threats and actions aimed at securing concessions. It hasn't yet named a date, of course, and its statement makes clear that it wants a negotiated settlement with the U.S. at the end of the day. But testing a weapon would mark the crossing of a threshold over which retreat may be difficult. Only one country has ever dismantled an arsenal of actual nuclear weapons, and that was South Africa during the early 1990s, in one of the final acts of the outgoing apartheid regime...
...Pyongyang clearly wants the international community to believe that it is prepared to dramatically raise the stakes now in pursuit of a "grand bargain" agreement with the U.S. All the diplomatic players have adopted familiar responses, with Japan threatening harsh responses to a nuclear test and Russia and China calling for restraint and diplomacy. Hawks in the U.S. policy debate will say the new threat is a sign that sanctions are effective and are hurting the regime; doves will warn that escalating pressure will simply provoke the North Koreans into crossing the nuclear Rubicon...