The U.S. Department of State today announced a breakthrough in negotiations with North Korea over the country’s controversial nuclear program.

Under the terms of the deal, North Korea will suspend nuclear testing, uranium enrichment and long-range ballistic-missile development in exchange for 240,000 tonnes of food aid from the U.S. The agreement would also allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors to enter the Yongbyon nuclear complex for the first time since 2009.

Of particular interest to the IAEA will be North Korea's uranium-enrichment program at Yongbyon. Sig Hecker, a metallurgist at Stanford University in California, saw 2,000 centrifuges during an informal visit he made to the site in 2010, but international inspectors have never officially had access to the facility.

This isn't the first time that North Korea has used its nuclear program as a bargaining chip. In exchange for disabling its 5-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon in 2008, North Korea was removed from the U.S.’s famous “axis of evil” list (which included Iraq and Iran) and supplied with fuel aid.

The agreement is the first major international political deal made by the nation's new leader, Kim Jong-un, who came to power in December 2011 following the death of the previous incumbent, Kim Jong-il. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the new leader is seriously considering cooperation with the West, warns Duyeon Kim, deputy director of nuclear non-proliferation at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, D.C. Kim says that negotiations had been ongoing since before Kim Jong-il's death.

Both North Korea and the U.S. seem hopeful, yet wary. The State Department warned of “profound concerns” regarding North Korea's behavior generally, and the Korean Central News Agency warned that the moratorium would extend only “while productive dialogues continue.”

Duyeon Kim notes that there is no timeline for either the moratorium or the resumption of inspections. "We will have to see whether North Korea follows through," she says.

This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on February 29, 2012.

5 Comments

1. 1. alan6302 10:17 PM 2/29/12

   I am expecting the nuclear war in 10 - 11 months

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2. 2. GG 11:20 PM 2/29/12

   Looks like Kim Jong-un is a hungry man, lol

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3. 3. oldvic 03:12 AM 3/1/12

   "Trust, but verify".

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4. 4. And Then What? 07:24 AM 3/1/12

   The North Korean Leaders spend all the Wealth, generated by the North Korean People, on themselves and the weapons that keep them in their positions of power and when they run out of food to keep the “slaves” nourished enough to provide that wealth then they threaten their neighbors and the world in general with rhetoric, bluster and sword rattling until they get an injection of free calories to keep the slaves fed so the whole cycle can be sustained and repeated. This practice cannot be expected to be maintained indefinitely. The reality is that by supplying food Aid the rest of the world is, in fact, propping up a slave-state which would eventually crumble from within without such outside support.

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5. 5. drafter 11:10 AM 3/1/12

   Left out of the article is the fact that North Korea is only allowing inspectors in one of it's six facilities. So what do you think their doing in the others. They played the same game with both Clinton and Bush and now Obama all we are doing is claiming to be doing something while buying them time to placate their own people while they build their weapons. Now personally I think we should leave S. Korea because they are more then capable of caring for themselves now and I don't care who builds bombs until they use them, then we can deal with it. Note without our money to buy them food their country would probably collapse from within and we wouldn't have to worry about them making any bomb.

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