Word: pyongyang
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...disclosed that it was pursuing nuclear weapons development, China's Vice Foreign Minister Wang Yi presented a stern position paper to the all-powerful Politburo. In the past, such memorandums have cast North Korean behavior as reasonable. This time, however, Wang introduced the damning phrase "diplomatic adventurism" to describe Pyongyang's tactics, according to a Chinese policymaker familiar with the contents...
...weapons of mass destruction on its eastern flank, too. Last month, during a regular meeting of senior foreign ministry diplomats at a luxury compound east of Beijing, a group of about fifteen department heads and other officials discussed a request from Washington that Beijing use its influence to convince Pyongyang to halt nuclear weapons development. According to one of the meeting's participants, "officials suggested cutting energy and food aid, and even opening the border to let more refugees in"?radical moves more aligned with Washington's "axis of evil" playbook than traditional Chinese policy. "I was stunned," the insider...
...claim that it had already built a couple of nuclear bombs. When Washington's only response was a stern rebuke and the cutting off of all food and energy aid from the U.S. and its allies to the starving communist nation, North Korea upped the stakes: This week Pyongyang announced that it planned to restart a nuclear power plant closed down under the 1994 agreement because it was producing weapons-grade plutonium. Although they said the move was necessitated by the cutoff of fuel supplies, the North Koreans' implied threat was underscored when they demanded that the International Atomic Energy...
...insists that it wants to pursue a peaceful, diplomatic solution to the crisis. Military action is not contemplated in response to North Korea's WMD, and not only because Iraq is the Administration's overwhelming priority. Even without nuclear weapons, North Korea's conventional military resources are formidable, and Pyongyang's artillery could destroy the South Korean capital, Seoul, in a matter of hours. A military showdown on the Korean peninsula could easily claim one million lives...
...South Korean officials, however, see the latest nuclear muscle flexing by Pyongyang as the continuation of a long-established pattern of extortion through brinkmanship - the North Koreans unveil some new weapon threat and hang tough, and then agree to mothball it in exchange for economic aid. Even now, Pyongyang is sending out mixed messages, brandishing a nuclear threat but also hinting that it would disarm in exchange for a non-aggression pact and other concessions from the U.S. That's not palatable to the Bush Administration, but the alternative is a policy of malign neglect in which North Korea...