Yes they are full of it. Unfortunately it is also apparent they will also be full of nuclear weapons. So it will come down to a tough choice for Bush and the US. The UN reticence about Iraq clearly shows that no other nation will have the nerve to face down the North Koreans.

North Korea is deliberately trying to ire the US. They are succeeding. However, they will have to bargain away a lot if they want to have any aid resume from the US. They are just trying to have more things to bargain on their side, to try and get more in return.

I think the official story in Washington is that the English translation of North Korea's announcement was wrong... http://washingtontimes.com/world/20030419-248948.htm So, the Norks (new nickname, like it?) are either almost done with preparing the fuel rods for reprocessing, or are almost done with the reprocessing. If it's the first, we should warn them to stop or we will bomb them. If it's the second, we should bomb them, and tell the survivors why we did.

If they've really made progress in reprocessing the material it should have been picked up by intelligence, no?

Yeah, we probably would know about it. I think that NK is going to be put on hold until after the 2004 election, when hopefully we have enough of a ABM shield to block anything they can throw at us. The good news at this point is that we can produce more ABM missiles then they can produce nukes. So by then the military should be ready to eliminate the NK regime. Hopefully Iran will have been taken care of before then, even more hopefully it was done internally.

NK definitely lacks the capability to put nukes on missiles. In fact I doubt they have real weapons at all, at most a couple of crude devices that are too cumbersome to be delivered in any meaningful way. So as far as the missile threat to the US is concerned, it's still years away, and even then 100-200 ABM interceptors would make it very difficult for 10-20 Taepo-Dongs, assuming they're not hit by preemptive strikes. But the NK threat to Japan is very real and likely to grow. With 200 missiles that can carry chemical/biological warheads to Japan, I don't see an effective defense anytime soon, especially given how much political inertia there is in Japan. The US is probably too focused on NMD to devote a lot of resources to TMD. Ironically, China might get a TMD capability to defend against NK missiles before Japan. It'll probably be modeled on the Moscow ABM System and they'll use it to protect major cities like Beijing and Shanghai.

Japan pulled off Pearl Harbor during a diplomatic negotiation, and look what it got them. The United States has been taking out irrational actors since Cornwallis. Don't think North Korea represents innovation in the "hide your intentions" department. They know they have no chance against the United States when (not if) we have a reason to attack them. And Osama Bin Laden lowered our "when" threshold to a doctrine of pre-emption. It's going to be like that movie "Final Countdown" where the USS Nimitz goes through a weird storm and winds up back in 1941, a day or two before the Pearl Harbor attack. (As a piece of alternate historical fiction, it fizzles because they Star Trekked any excitement out of it by -not- altering history) But pre-empting North Korea is going to be something like that - F-15s vs. Mitsubishi Zeros (Splash one Zero!)

Though NK intentions are clear it is their range of possible actions that could cause considerable trouble. Specifically I refer to the possibility of financially bankrupt NK selling a nuclaer weapon to another country. Imagine if that NK ship full of conventional weapons that was intercepted heading to Yemen were sailing to Iran or Syria with a nuclear weapon instead. When NK begins building 1 or 2 nukes per month then that will soon become a very real possibility.

>Though NK intentions are clear it is their range of possible actions that could cause considerable trouble. Specifically I refer to the possibility of financially bankrupt NK selling a nuclaer weapon to another country. Imagine if that NK ship full of conventional weapons that was intercepted heading to Yemen were sailing to Iran or Syria with a nuclear weapon instead. When NK begins building 1 or 2 nukes per month then that will soon become a very real possibility.< Wouldn't it be funny if we allowed North Korea to sell their nuclear weapons to whoever gave them money, and through a series of intelligence front groups and secret manipulations, South Korea ends up with the nukes? But seriously, while the potential for selling the bombs themselves is there, I'd be more concerned about the sale of weapons-grade plutonium itself, rather than a bulky pre-constructed bomb.