Word: plutonium
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...framed and hung. I felt vindicated. I had been fighting this venture for more than a decade. The project was unsafe, never made economic or technical sense and set a bizarre nonproliferation precedent?it began construction of a reactor that could make many bombs' worth of plutonium while suspending routine international inspections of North Korea's nuclear activities designed to prevent proliferation. Pyongyang, moreover, blew the deal apart late in 2002 when it revealed it was building a covert uranium enrichment plant. For these reasons, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced in July that the reactor project would "cease...
...history clearly demonstrates that it cannot be trusted to develop nuclear technology that can easily be converted to military use. The nation hid development of a gas centrifuge cascade that could be used to make weapons-grade uranium and development of a nuclear reactor capable of producing plutonium from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for several years...
...accused North Korea of carrying on a secret program to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons; North Korea then accused the U.S. of failing to live up to its end of the agreement, withdrew from international protocols and began to reprocess nuclear material in earnest. It's that material, from plutonium rods previously been under international supervision, which North Korea is believed to have used to construct its still-untested nuclear arsenal...
...Korea categorically rejected the U.S.-backed objective of "complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization." Pyongyang countered with its own preferred resolution, which would provide the North with energy and other aid, plus security guarantees and diplomatic recognition, in return for freezing its nuclear programs. Because that proposed freeze covered only plutonium-based weapons (Pyongyang has never publicly acknowledged its secret uranium-enrichment program), North Korea's proposal amounted to international payments for a temporary?and only partial?halt. The proposal wasn't an ambitious opening bid in a denuclearization negotiation, or even an argument about "the shape of the table...
...table, but only after a promise of half a million tons of free rice from South Korea. And in the months leading up to the current talks, North Korea did not exactly signal its wholehearted enthusiasm for denuclearization. Instead, Pyongyang announced that it was proceeding apace with plutonium reprocessing and with "weaponizing" its plutonium; it also claimed that it had "manufactured nukes," and declared that "these weapons" would be "kept for self-defense under any circumstances...