Word: pyongyang
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...North Korea's announcement of the successful underground detonation of a nuclear weapon has called Washington's bluff. President Bush had long warned that the U.S. will not "tolerate" a nuclear-armed North Korea, and just last week his chief negotiator with the hermit regime, Christopher Hill, warned that Pyongyang would have to choose between having nuclear weapons and having a future. Monday morning's announced test suggests that Kim Jong-il has decided to test Washington's "or else...
...that North Korea submit to denuclearization under international supervision. China and South Korea will likely back the principle that North Korea must be punished for crossing a red line, but their aversion to sanctions is based on fears of potentially cataclysmic chaos accompanying the collapse of the regime in Pyongyang, and those fears won't have been eased by the regime's demonstration of a capacity to lash out with nuclear weapons if it is being choked to death. Given North Korea's huge standing army and the vulnerability of South Korea to its conventional artillery and missile capability...
...Shortly before the nuclear test, CNN had reported that North Korea had indicated to China that it might be prepared to hold off on testing a weapon if the U.S. agreed to direct talks. Presumably, Pyongyang will continue to pursue that diplomatic goal, hoping that the crisis it has created by testing a nuclear weapon will bring pressure on the U.S. to abandon its own refusal to deal directly with North Korea. Until now, China and South Korea, in particular, have urged the United States to engage in such a dialogue. It remains to be seen whether the nuke test...
...timed to disrupt two landmark summit meetings between new Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his counterparts in Beijing and Seoul. The test reportedly occurred as Abe was flying over the Korean peninsula, on his way from Beijing, where he spent Sunday, to Seoul. Yet in the short term, Pyongyang's provocation may have actually served to smooth the summits, giving the three estranged countries something they could all agree on: the need to deal with a nuclear North Korea...
...Bolton's almost cheerful description of what he called a "remarkable" Security Council session reflected a surprising reality - the North Korean nuclear test may actually be a boon to the U.S.' long-frustrated efforts to achieve consensus on how to deal with Pyongyang. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has done her best to leave behind the Bush Administration's go-it-alone cowboy diplomacy of the first term and build real international coalitions, but until the test she had no success convincing China and South Korea, the North's primary trading partners, to leverage their economic relationships into serious pressure...