Word: pyongyang
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Pyongyang has nuclear weapons, it's a different ball game...
This is familiar terrain for the experts in Washington, who say the main focus of the new intelligence estimate is considerably broader: an attempt by the U.S. Government to decide whether Pyongyang might ever be persuaded to give up its bomb program. The Defense Intelligence Agency took the most pessimistic view in the interagency study. Pentagon analysts think the North Koreans already have a bomb and are using the negotiations in order to buy time to advance their nuclear program...
...State Department, which leads the U.S. negotiating team, the position is that diplomacy might work because North Korea has much to gain. State believes Pyongyang might allow international safeguards and inspections on all its nuclear installations -- even the two waste sites it has been trying to hide -- in exchange for diplomatic recognition by the U.S., plus trade and economic aid from such countries as South Korea and Japan. The CIA takes a middle view: that the North Koreans may allow inspection of their seven declared facilities but not the two undeclared ones. The reason, the agency said in the report...
Bargaining on these central issues is still only prospective. The U.S.-North Korean talks at the U.N. are just a hopeful prelude to yet another round of high-level negotiations. The agreement Pyongyang and Washington were talking about last week is simply a reprise of one made last summer, when Pyongyang told the U.S. it would permit routine inspections and resume talks with South Korea. The North never fulfilled those promises, and it must do so in order to get to the next, third, substantive round of talks with the U.S. That is where the key issues...
None of the players on the U.S. side of the game knows for sure whether Pyongyang will make the big concession and halt its drive for nuclear weapons. And if it does, the Clinton Administration is demanding more: the surrender by the North Koreans of any nuclear weapons they have hidden away. Even then the U.S. might not offer recognition in return unless Pyongyang is receptive to complaints about its human-rights abuses and sales of missiles to the Middle East. No matter how the intelligence estimates may vary, all the experts agree this is an agenda that will...