Word: pyongyang
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...took two more years of an excruciating saraband between envoys who may have loathed each other but had too much to lose to get mad. Now American and North Korean diplomats are in the trenches again, speaking tactfully on matters of life and death, as Washington tries to stop Pyongyang's apparent march toward building an atomic bomb, and Pyongyang tries to head off the international sanctions its ambitions will inevitably prompt...
...heating up. Hans Blix, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, is expected to tell the U.N. this week that North Korea's violation of international nuclear safeguards is "continuing and widening." In addition to blocking inspections of two secret sites to which the IAEA demanded access last February, Pyongyang is now refusing to allow even routine monitoring of five declared nuclear sites at Yongbyon, 65 miles north of the capital, and two other sites elsewhere. At a 5-MW power reactor whose fuel core could be mined for plutonium to make bombs, IAEA inspectors are not being allowed...
...ultimately to war. Three weeks ago, he told Washington he would begin the process this week if the North didn't start behaving. But the West decided to keep negotiating instead. "We're not talking in terms of a deadline," says an IAEA spokesman. Reason: fear of driving Pyongyang into a corner from which it would fight its way out. The North Koreans have threatened to resume plutonium reprocessing and their atomic-weapons program if the U.S. breaks off talks over the stalled inspections. That threat seems real. Even the flashlight search, as well as satellite photos, showed the North...
Moreover, if an oil or trade embargo is imposed, U.S. analysts fear a violent response. Also, Pyongyang diplomats have said privately that any attack on their nuclear facilities would trigger an invasion of the South. None of these risks of escalation are worth taking yet, since Western intelligence analysts are fairly sure that the North has only small amounts of plutonium and no operational bomb. Further, says a State Department official, "none of our main interlocutors on this issue -- South Korea, Russia, Japan, China -- think negotiations have been exhausted...
...first high-level talks between Washington and Pyongyang in decades began last June but stalled because of the North's foot dragging. To see if they might be rescued, officials have held a series of meetings in New York City since September, mostly at U.N. headquarters and at least once in a fashionable coffee shop. "But there has been no socializing," says one official. The U.S. insists that Pyongyang live up to its promises to permit formal IAEA inspections and exchange envoys with South Korea for more nuclear talks. If it does, Washington will resume formal talks and offer some...