Only last month, the conventional wisdom was that North Korea was showing promising new signs of moderation, what with Kim Jong Il's parley with Bill Clinton, the release of two American journalists and some South Korean hostages, and a highly publicized meeting between a Pyongyang diplomat and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson.
On Friday, the charm offensive ended. In a letter to the U.N. Security Council, the North announced that "reprocessing of spent fuel rods is at its final phase and extracted plutonium is being weaponized." As significant, Pyongyang also announced that an experimental uranium enrichment process—the second route to an atomic bomb—was nearing its "completion phase."
Some background: In 2002, U.S. officials presented North Korean negotiators with evidence that Pyongyang was secretly working on a uranium enrichment program, a violation of both the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the Clinton Administration's 1994 "Agreed Framework" that supposedly put a stop to the North's nuclear ambitions. Remarkably, the Koreans admitted as much—an admission they later denied making. The admission triggered the Bush Administration's decision to suspend its obligations under the 1994 accord, which included fuel shipments and the construction of electricity-generating "light-water" reactors in the North.
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