Adopting an aggressive posture, North Korea has announced that it will go ahead with its nuclear weapons program in protest against “the hostile U.S. policies towards the regime”. The first project to resume work on will be graphite-moderated reactors. These reactors can produce large quantities of material for making atomic bombs.



The North Korea has apparently upped the ante to intensify the N-standoff, so as to tone down the US-led pressure on the Pyongyang’s alleged human rights abuses and alleged illicit activities, such as money laundering and drug trafficking. “By raising the stakes in the nuclear dispute, North Korea wants to focus negotiations on the nuclear issue in order to avoid mounting pressure on non-nuclear issues,” a South Korean government official said.



In fact, according to a 1994 agreement, North Korea was supposed to freeze its Soviet-designed weapon-grade plutonium-producing graphite-moderated reactors, as a gesture for the US promise to build two safer 1,000-megawatt light-water reactors (LWR) for North Korea. But the pact fell through in late 2002 when the US charged that North Korea was maintaining a uranium-based nuclear weapons program. This charge was refuted by the North Korean authorities, following which the US-led allies stopped building LWRs in the Communist country. Ever since, it has been maintaining that as the project was abandoned midway, the US must compensate for the energy-related losses incurred by it. And since the US doesn’t find itself under any obligation to compensate the losses, Pyongyang has stumbled upon a plea to build the graphite-moderated reactors.



Adopting a two-pronged strategy, the North Korean also said that Washington’s criticism of its record of human rights was “hypocritical” and that it was “a US bid to use the human rights issue as part of a drive to topple the Communist regime”. A foreign ministry spokesman went on to say that “the United States is a typical criminal state which politicizes the human rights issue and applies selectivity and double standards concerning the issue”. Incidentally, only a few days back, the US Ambassador to South Korea had also called North Korea a “criminal regime”, engaged in weapons sale and drug trafficking.



As of now, it’s just war of words that is occupying the centrestage, and an amicable settlement of the issue sounds nothing more than a cry in the wilderness.



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