Word: tested
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...suspected nuclear sites 24 hours a day. Defectors from the North have been thoroughly scrubbed, and spies have been recruited. Diplomats from the U.S. and four other countries have talked on and off for years with their counterparts from Pyongyang. For all that, the May 25 nuclear-weapons test--North Korea's second in three years--makes clear just how dangerously unpredictable...
...international community struck the usual poses that follow Pyongyang's periodic outrages. President Barack Obama said in a statement that the test would "serve to deepen North Korea's isolation." Japan said it would "not tolerate" such actions and called for an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council, a demand South Korea backed. Russia expressed "serious concern." Even the Chinese, North Korea's alleged ally, said they were "firmly opposed" to the test...
...world's most isolated country; the idea that Kim Jong Il's regime even cares if its isolation "deepens" is dubious at best. But what might change as a result of the blast--estimated to be several times more powerful than the one in North Korea's 2006 test--is how the international community deals with the planet's most destabilizing nuclear regime...
...fundamental notion underlying U.S. diplomacy with Pyongyang since the Clinton era--a hawkish detour under George W. Bush notwithstanding--is that the North can be bribed. Yet the country's rhetoric since Obama's Inauguration has been vitriolic. It is possible that its most recent nuclear test will finally convince diplomats that the North Korea they see is the one they get: that perhaps on the question of nukes, it simply can't be bribed...
Reports from defector groups are not always reliable. But following its latest test, the assumption that North Korea will be ultimately willing to negotiate away its nuclear program is under new scrutiny. North Korea's "ultimate goal now is to be a full nuclear state," says Baek Seung Joo, director of the Center for Security and Strategy at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses. If that's true, containment (not bribery) will need to become the focus of the outside world's diplomacy with Pyongyang--starting in Washington...