Word: pyongyang
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...observers believe the withdrawal is both a sign of paranoia among North Korean leaders and a dogged determination to have their own way. "Hard-liners in the North are thought to oppose family reunions because they fear any contact with the outside world," says TIME Tokyo correspondent Tim Larimer. "Pyongyang needs money, food and fertilizer but it doesn?t want strings attached," he adds. "Whenever North Korea has edged to even the mildest form of engagement with the outside world, it has preceded such moves with a show of force." In other words, Pyongyang only wants help from benefactors whose...
...savvy foreign scientists to measure the punch packed by weapons they already possess without actually testing them. It's a doozy for the Chinese, who may have pocketed U.S. secrets just before they signed the nuclear test-ban treaty in 1996. And then there are the nuclear wannabes from Pyongyang to Tripoli, to whom the Chinese might sell the codes. Warns Gary Milhollin of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, based in Washington: "This could facilitate nuclear-weapons development by China, or anybody else, without our knowing about...
...however, was also a prime target audience. The launch came just hours before diplomats from both countries were due to sit down in New York City to iron out a minicrisis that erupted over the North's nuclear ambitions. U.S. spy satellites revealed a massive excavation northeast of Pyongyang that suggested the North could be attempting to revive a nuclear weapons project they had agreed to shelve. It's still not clear what is going on at the dig. Some analysts guess that the project is a kind of bluff, an attempt to leverage the impoverished regime's only real...
North Korea clearly doesn't think the U.S. has been taking it seriously enough of late. Pyongyang agreed to shut down its nuclear facilities in 1994 in exchange for two new reactors that don't produce bomb fuel and a yearly gift of 500,000 tons of heavy fuel oil for conventional power plants. Washington also agreed to roll back sanctions. The hard-won deal brought both sides back from the brink of war. But Pyongyang is frustrated over what it sees as foot dragging in Washington. The reactors are behind schedule, and so are the oil deliveries...
...Pyongyang may have a point. The Administration, U.S. critics complain, has moved on to crises in other parts of the globe, putting the 1994 agreement on autopilot. What's more, the White House underestimated how much money it needed from Congress to pay for the oil, which costs about $55 million annually. This year it asked for only $35 million, hoping to pass the tin cup among its allies. That hasn't worked, since many countries question why the world's leading economic power can't come up with the money. But U.S. lawmakers are even more reluctant to bankroll...