Word: pyongyang
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What's the world's most worrisome nuclear-proliferation hotspot? Answer: the diplomatic table in Beijing where six-party talks are periodically convened to discuss North Korean nuclear disarmament. Every time the international negotiators gather-or even threaten to gather-Pyongyang seems to take another step toward unrestrained nuclear breakout...
...summer of 2003, when the talks were first planned, Pyongyang merely insisted on its right to hold what it coyly called a "war deterrent." Five rounds of dialogue later, there has been real progress-not in the negotiations, but in North Korea's nuclear program. After defiantly admitting that the nation already possessed nukes and later stating it would not get rid of them "under any circumstances," the North last October shocked the world with its first nuclear test. You might think that the diplomatic sophisticates in charge of the negotiations would have detected a discouraging pattern by now. Apparently...
...North Korea, long a Chinese ally, with whom China once fought a war against the U.S. As North Korea's leader Kim Jong Il developed a nuclear-weapons program in the 1990s, China had to choose between irking the U.S.--which would have implied doing little to rein in Pyongyang--or stiffing its former prot...
...Security Council until December 2005, says Hu had long indicated to visiting groups of Americans his skepticism about Kim's intentions. When the North finally tested a nuke last fall, China joined the U.S. and other regional powers in condemning Kim and supported a U.N. Security Council resolution sanctioning Pyongyang. Says a senior U.S. official: "If you asked experts several years ago, Could you imagine China taking these actions toward a longtime ally in cooperation with us and Japan? Most people would have said...
...nobody in Washington is getting carried away. Beijing has been helpful on North Korea because it's more important to China that Pyongyang not provoke a regional nuclear arms race than it is to deny the U.S. diplomatic support. Contrast such helpfulness with China's behavior on the dispute over Iran's nuclear ambitions. In December, China signed a $16 billion contract with Iran to buy natural gas and help develop some oil fields, and it has consistently joined Russia in refusing to back the tough sanctions against Tehran sought by the U.S. and Europe. "It's hard...