Word: kim
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...with a state that responds to neither the carrots nor the sticks of conventional international relations, he appears as powerless as those who have preceded him. Yes, a new Security Council resolution may tighten sanctions on the North. But if anyone thinks that will persuade the regime of Kim Jong Il to give up its nuclear ambitions, I have a dish of cold kimchi for them...
Even before the mystifying Kim Jong Il took power in 1994, the outside world was trying mightily to figure out how the North Korean regime works. Spy satellites are trained on its suspected nuclear sites 24 hours a day. Defectors from the North have been thoroughly scrubbed, and spies have been recruited. Diplomats from the U.S. and four other countries have talked on and off for years with their counterparts from Pyongyang. For all that, the May 25 nuclear-weapons test--North Korea's second in three years--makes clear just how dangerously unpredictable...
None of that offers much hope for change. North Korea is already the world's most isolated country; the idea that Kim Jong Il's regime even cares if its isolation "deepens" is dubious at best. But what might change as a result of the blast--estimated to be several times more powerful than the one in North Korea's 2006 test--is how the international community deals with the planet's most destabilizing nuclear regime...
North Korean leaders have long cited the year 2012 as being particularly significant. It will mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il Sung, the nation's founder and Kim Jong Il's father and predecessor. Kim Jong Il, now 67 and ailing since a stroke last summer, is thought to be arranging his succession: analysts believe he wants to pass power to his youngest son, 26-year-old Kim Jong...
...this febrile environment, the military is said to have stepped up its influence in Pyongyang. A group of North Korean exiles has circulated a report saying that Kim has assured his generals that by 2012, the North will have achieved the status of a nuclear state, one with the ability to fit a warhead on a long-range missile...