Word: pyongyang
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...summer of 2006, in the immediate aftermath of North Korea's unexpected long-range missile launch, the Chinese government quietly sent a senior envoy, former foreign minister Tang Jiaxuan, to Pyongyang to express Beijing's displeasure. Tang cooled his heels for a couple of days, before finally meeting - briefly, diplomatic sources have said - with leader Kim Jong Il. Just three months later, in October 2006, North Korea again defied the world and tested a nuclear bomb for the first time...
...Pyongyang has, in the past, made a habit of annoying China, its only ostensible ally in the world, what must Beijing be thinking now? For most of the past six years, Beijing has been the host and chief promoter of the so-called six-party talks. Their explicit goal: to get North Korea to give up its nuclear-weapons program. When the North launched another long-range ballistic missile in early April, Beijing helped promote the fig leaf at the U.N. Security Council that the rocket carried a communications satellite and thus might not be a direct violation...
...Research Center at the Korea Institute of Defense Analysis, acknowledges that North Korea appears to have advanced its nuclear program and that its "ultimate goal now is to be a full nuclear state." If that's true - and it's a big if - the outside world's diplomacy with Pyongyang will need to change, starting in Washington. Now that the tremors of what South Korea's geological service today called the "man-made earthquake" in the North have died down, that's one issue President Obama will have to confront head-on. - with reporting from Stephen Kim in Seoul...
...fundamental notion underlying U.S. diplomacy with Pyongyang, going back to Bill Clinton's first term as President, is that North Korea can be bribed. In this view, everything that Kim's regime says or does is meant simply to up the ante in negotiations and get the U.S. and its negotiating partners to sweeten their offerings. This conviction is widely shared among career diplomats in Seoul as well, and they joined their State Department colleagues in outrage when the Bush Administration at first took a confrontational approach with the DPRK. Bush's hard-line stance, the critics believe, prompted Pyongyang...
...this febrile environment, the military is said to have stepped up its influence in Pyongyang. A group of North Korean exiles today circulated a report saying that after the missile launch last month, Kim visited a group of generals and assured them that by 2012 the North will achieve the status of a "nuclear state," one with the ability to fit a warhead on a long-range missile...