Foreword
On February 5, North Korea reactivated a five-megawatt nuclear reactor in the city of Yongbyon, breathing life into a nuclear program that supposedly had lain dormant since 1994. This latest escalation of an increasingly tense standoff between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, as North Korea is officially known, and the United States, threatens to unravel an eight-year-old agreement between the two nations — just as the United States is focusing its forces in the Middle East for a possible war in Iraq. At issue is North Korea’s potential to rapidly process uranium from its nuclear reactor into weapons-grade plutonium,…
