Word: pyongyang
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...National Security Agency - eavesdrops on communications. Defectors from the North have been thoroughly scrubbed and spies have been recruited. During the presidency of George W. Bush, diplomats from the U.S. and four other countries talked, on and off, for years with their counterparts from Pyongyang...
...that, days like today make it clear just how much the outside world doesn't know - and how dangerously unpredictable North Korea can be. On Monday morning, Pyongyang tested a nuclear bomb for the second time in three years. "We just didn't see this coming," a usually very well-informed intelligence source in east Asia told TIME today. The magnitude of the explosion in North Hamgyong Province, in the northeastern part of the country, near the Chinese and Russian borders, was four times greater than that of the last test, in the autumn of 2006, analysts in Seoul said...
...might be, talk to the Russians. Moscow is "concerned" - not outraged - by today's test. Don't expect much, in other words, from the Security Council, even if the test is determined to be as direct a violation as possible of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1718, which calls on Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear program. The Chinese, like Obama, desperately want the North Koreans to return to the negotiating table in Beijing, where the so-called six-party talks were held during the Bush years. But Beijing may be coming to the reluctant conclusion, if it hasn't already, that...
...such dire circumstances, the North's leaders not only consider nuclear weapons and long-range missiles a necessary deterrent, they surely also regard them as their only bargaining chips. And the bargaining can only be with Washington, which Pyongyang has recognized for some time as its best hope for surviving. From the North's point of view, any bargain would have to take the form of a new package deal that would reaffirm to Kim Jong Il that the U.S. is not hostile to the regime, accepts its legitimacy and is willing to provide long-term development assistance. Only...
...Some critics will say that a dictatorial regime such as North Korea, with all its human-rights abuses, does not deserve added security. But as former U.S. defense secretary William Perry said in 1999, on returning from Pyongyang: "We have to deal with the North Korean government not as we wish they would be, but as in fact they are." Although the U.S. does not consider itself a threat to the North, Perry continued, Pyongyang believes the opposite. The North's need of a deterrent, Perry said, has "a very clear logic." The prescription seems plain: keep engaging the North...