Word: pyongyang
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...eleventh hour, North Korea agreed late on Friday to "suspend" its withdrawal from the pact, pulling Asia back from the start of a nuclear arms race. If Pyongyang will permanently rejoin the treaty and agree to inspections, the U.S. is ready to cancel its yearly military exercises with South Korea and make a "no first use" pledge not to initiate the use of nuclear weapons on the peninsula. While U.S. officials are still puzzled by North Korea's actions, they say they now realize how deeply inspections disturbed its closed society...
...least one nuclear bomb, and it has successfully test-fired a new missile, the 650-mile-range No- Dong I, that could reach beyond South Korea to Japan, China or eastern Russia. Kim's government is an eager peddler of missiles to other countries, and Western analysts fear that Pyongyang could assist other would-be nuclear powers like Iran...
North Korea is currently the gravest concern. Pyongyang signed the nonproliferation treaty in 1985 but grudgingly agreed only last year to allow inspectors to examine what it insisted was its purely civilian nuclear-power industry. When the monitors showed up, they confirmed intelligence reports that the installation at Yongbyon, north of the capital, had been processing plutonium at least since...
...blandishments will keep Pyongyang honest -- even if it remains formally in the nonproliferation pact -- if its real intent is to free itself from international oversight while it pursues its nuclear dream. North Korea may have temporized to forestall U.N. economic sanctions that loomed if it became the first member to quit the treaty. But most observers are pessimistic that Kim will really cave in to political or economic pressure. "We're not dealing with rational people but with an unreconstructedly Stalinist regime," says a top British diplomat. "They don't believe in compromise but in maximum advantage...
Though the Security Council could authorize military means to disarm or punish Pyongyang, any attempt to use force would be extremely tricky. Bombing a functioning nuclear facility could produce an instant Chernobyl and, probably, retaliation. "We might try to take out their nuclear capability with a scalpel," says a Western analyst in Seoul, "but they would respond with a chain...