Word: pyongyang
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...government is trying to rein in the new freewheeling spirit. Under a criminal-code revision last year, Pyongyang explicitly banned "individual commercial activities" and explicitly made it a crime to participate in real estate brokering, money lending and private hooch production. Authorities in Hoeryong last month confiscated video tapes and rounded up the families of those North Koreans who had defected and sent them to prison camps, according to refugees living in Seoul who have contacts with the North...
...this week, his government announced that, as has long been suspected by U.S. intelligence, North Korea has indeed built nuclear weapons "for self-defense." Though the bulletin ended years of speculation about the general state of Kim's nuclear-weapons program, the declaration was actually two blows in one: Pyongyang also announced it was pulling out of joint talks with the U.S., China, Japan, Russia and South Korea to keep the Korean peninsula nuclear-free. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, hoping to play down the news, called the announcement "unfortunate...
...more than that. For more than a decade, the U.S. and its allies have insisted that they would not allow Kim to acquire nuclear weapons, out of fear that he would sell nukes to anyone willing to pay for them and set off an Asian arms race. Pyongyang's declaration, while impossible to confirm, means Kim has probably realized his quest. A nuclear-armed North Korea means that President Bush's multilateral strategy for preventing Pyongyang from acquiring nukes has failed just as dramatically as Clinton's policy of direct engagement did a decade ago. It means that even when...
...there was another explanation for the announcement: Pyongyang needed to change the subject. Two weeks ago, the White House secretly dispatched two National Security Council (NSC) aides to Tokyo, Beijing and Seoul armed with evidence that North Korea may have supplied a uranium compound to Libya for its weapons labs. The gaseous compound, known as uranium hexafluoride (UF6), is a precursor to bomb-grade uranium, something bombmakers feed into centrifuges to harvest the highly fissionable isotope uranium-235 (U-235) that is at the heart of an atom bomb. Though UF6 is hard to make, it's possible to track...
...evidence was rushed to officials in Beijing, who have tolerated Pyongyang's denials that it has a UF6 processing facility. The U.S. intelligence made that view seem dangerously naive. If North Korea was producing enough UF6 to export to Libya, it surely had enough for its weapons labs at home. There is some evidence that North Korea sold its UF6 not directly to Libya but via the black-market bazaar of Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan. That means that North Korea may not have known where its UF6 was going when it sold it, says Gordon Flake, a North Korea analyst...