[...]that the nation wouldn't cave in to such pressure now that it's a nuclear weapons power.
The bellicose remarks -- the central government's first response to the U.N. measures imposed last weekend -- came as China warned the North against stoking tensions and the American nuclear envoy arrived in South Korea for talks.
Then there are indications from South Korean and Japanese officials that North Korea may be preparing for a second nuclear test.
Here is an excerpt from an indepth analysis by Newsweek.
The human costs of North Korea's nuclear ambitions on the nation's best and brightest were terrible. Few paid a higher price than Kimchaek University's class of '62, according to a grad who defected from North Korea several years ago and told NEWSWEEK his story. As graduation at the elite college neared more than 40 years ago, the buzz on campus was that Kim Il Sung had ordered construction of an advanced research facility to study atomic energy, and that patriotic young scientists soon would be mobilized to work there. "Our professors really pushed the need for nuclear development," he recalls. "The rumor circulating among students was that those of us sent there wouldn't have long to live."
The defector, spared the fate of those assigned to nuclear labs, spent his adult life watching unlucky classmates grow sick, weak and despondent. On leave, one confided a Confucian desperation to marry and sire children before radiation rendered him sterile. "It was exactly what we feared," the defector says, still saddened by their sacrifice. "These guys went bald. Many of them lost their eyebrows. Some of them had constant nosebleeds. They looked so weak it was hard to even face them. The thinking was, 'If one scientist falls there will always be others to take his place'." That logic not only ravaged a generation of scientists sent like worker bees into toxic nuclear labs. It cost billions in hard currency that might have fed starving people and hobbled the national economy by imposing perpetual austerity under slogans like "Military first."
[...]Indeed, the history of North Korea's program is evidence that "any country on the map with a population of 20 to 25 million will have the core group of people who can [go nuclear] if they squeeze their economy hard enough," says Daniel Pinkston, a nonproliferation expert at the Monterey Institute for International Studies. And North Korea has long been, to say the least, quite open to squeezing people in pursuit of power—including many along the Potomac River half a world away.
[...]Oct. 17, 2000, was a beautiful moonlit night in Washington. Marshal Cho Myong Rok, second only to Kim in North Korea, stood sipping drinks with Madeleine Albright on the terrace of the State Department's opulent Benjamin Franklin Room. In a meeting earlier that day with President Clinton, Cho had declared that Pyongyang had renounced terrorism, and he delivered Kim Jong Il's personal invitation to the president to visit Pyongyang.
The two sides were tantalizingly near a deal to stop all North Korean missile exports and cease development, testing and deployment of anything other than short-range Scuds. At least so the Clinton team believed. In exchange, the North would get full diplomatic recognition, the promise of billions in aid from Washington and Tokyo, and the stamp of legitimacy and guarantee of security that a Clinton visit would bring, says Albright's former senior aide, Wendy Sherman. According to Yang Sungchul, the South Korean ambassador to Washington who was there that night, Albright and Marshal Cho conversed in one corner, she looking comfortable and the general bolt-upright as if standing at attention. "I'm sure he was overwhelmed" by the culture shock, says Yang: here was Cho, the leading general of a country whose capital features a U.S. war-crimes museum, surrounded by the enemy.
A week later Albright was in Pyongyang, meeting with what she described as a well-informed and charming Kim, who gave a sophisticated rundown of his security situation and graciously directed his waiters not to give her too much alcohol during toasts. At one point, recalls Sherman, Kim even called for U.S. troops to remain on the Korean Peninsula (to guard against China). Albright was also treated to a show involving tens of thousands of acrobats and dancers at a stadium, intended to impress her with the glorious feats of the North Korean revolution. During the spectacle, a mass of performers flipped colored placards that together depicted Kim's Taepodong I missile taking off for its first test in 1998. Kim turned to Albright at that moment and said, "That was the first launch of that missile, and it will be the last."
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