Kim Jong-il, North Korea’s mercurial dictator, is once again trying to push the US and its allies into doing business on his terms, but Washington says it will not budge.
Pyongyang’s recent disclosure of a new uranium enrichment facility that looks more like something from the space age than from the Soviet bloc, seems in part intended to bolster its position and restart stalled international talks on its nuclear programme.
Indeed, North Korea claims to be proceeding with the enrichment plant – which it says is for purely civilian purposes – precisely because it can no longer wait for those negotiations to deliver the electricity the country badly needs.