Word: pyongyang
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Administration is giving Kim what he wants because it is getting, at long last, a full accounting from Pyongyang of the North's nuclear activities, which Kim was supposed to supply at the end of last year as part of an agreement North Korea signed in the so-called six-party talks. Pyongyang handed over that accounting to the Chinese government on Thursday morning...
...Terror lists] and in return they've given us a piece of paper, which we have no means of verifying." Skeptics don't believe that the North will come clean in the material handed over Thursday about its alleged uranium enrichment program. In late 2002, the U.S. accused Pyongyang of hiding just such a program, an allegation that led to the North pulling out of talks and ultimately testing its nuke in October of 2006. It's also doubtful that Pyongyang will say anything about its apparent involvement in the construction of a nuclear reactor in Syria, which Israel bombed...
Still, State department negotiators defend the U.S. move. They argue - and the dreary U.S. diplomatic history with North Korea bears this out - that Pyongyang simply doesn't move if it feels its negotiating partner isn't living up to its promises. In early 2007, for example, the U.S. agreed, over its own Treasury Department's objections, to unfreeze millions of dollars of North Korean assets then held in a bank in Macau. Once it did so, North Korea slowly began dismantling its nuclear reactor at Yongbyan, which provided the plutonium for the 8 to 16 nuclear bombs U.S. intelligence agencies...
...clear that President Bush has given his State Department marching orders to give the North what it wants, when it wants it - providing Pyongyang then delivers on the nuclear agreement. "Action for action," President Bush called this in a statement on Thursday. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in a piece in Thursday's Wall Street Journal aimed at pre-empting critics of the deal, wrote: "We will not accept [Pyongyang's] statement on faith. We will insist on verification." That, however, could plausibly be the next stumbling block with Pyongyang, since nothing in the agreements North Korea has signed...
...diplomatic partners (China, Japan, South Korea and Russia) will have 45 days to review Pyongyang's declaration. Going forward, a key question remains: even if it destroys the reactor at Yongbyan, will the North say where it is keeping the nukes that it has already built? Will it reveal where the fabrication of its nuclear weapons took place, since it is clear it was not at Yongbyan? And what about the site of the October 2006 nuclear test? Will the U.S. and its partners insist that that be dismantled...