Word: pyongyang
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...first scenario could be entitled Poor, Misunderstood, Rational North Korea: This narrative sees virtually everything the North has done since signing the so-called "Agreed Framework" nuclear deal with the Clinton Administration in 1994 as understandable - even predictable. Pyongyang signed away its plutonium reprocessing plant and in return was supposed to get a bunch of things in return, including diplomatic recognition from the United States, and two light water reactors for electric power generation from a U.S.-Japanese-South Korean?led consortium. But not much was delivered: The first of the reactors was supposed to have been finished...
Figuring out the thinking of the regime in Pyongyang is a full-time occupation for a small army of intelligence analysts and diplomats around the world. And among them, there are two primary - and competing - explanations for the North's pursuit of nuclear weapons and its strategy at the bargaining table...
...North Korea: What Pyongyang Wants...
...Feeling that it had been deceived, the North began a secret uranium enrichment program that violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the '94 deal. Confronted with evidence of this in October 2002, Pyongyang angrily announced it was restarting its plutonium-based nuke program, which it had frozen under the Agreed Framework, and expelled inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. Then, having been been named to President Bush's "Axis of Evil," and having watched the Bush Administration knock off Iraq, Kim Jong-il did the only thing he could do to guarantee no one would mess with...
...With the talks about to begin again and Pyongyang at least nominally willing to discuss how its nuclear program can be limited, Beijing now has to "think very hard about how they can be more effective," Lieberthal says. But in reality, Beijing's options are very limited. Pyongyang made it clear with the nuclear test - undertaken despite the express and public request by China's President Hu Jintao to refrain - that there are limits to Beijing's influence in Pyongyang...