Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) programs don’t pop-up overnight, especially in third-world backwaters like North Korea. Yet North Korea has announced via state-run media that it is capable of the “final stage of uranium enrichment.”
How shocking! There were no clues! There was no way to know this!
Well, not really. All [...]

The title assumes North Korea did test a nuclear device, which I think likely, and not an equivalent amount of TNT, initially thought a possibility in 2006 until radioactive isotopes of krypton and xenon were detected.
There are several reasons for a North Korea to conduct a nuclear test and it’s difficult if not impossible [...]

The Taepo Dong 2 (TD-2) (대포동 2호) missile launch(es) North Korea likely is preparing for, and recent voiding of all political-military deals with South Korea, are part of Pyongyang’s long-term strategy of regime survival. While these actions also have less important near-terms goals – expressing displeasure with ROK President Lee Myung-bak’s relatively hard-line approach [...]

According to CNN:
The United States on Saturday removed North Korea from its list of states that sponsor terrorism, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.
[…]
McCormack said the United States and North Korea had reached agreement “on an number of important verification measures” of North Korea’s nuclear program.
[…]
“Every element of verification that we sought is included [...]

Predicting the future is a chancy business at best and rarely rewards either the prognosticator or the consumers of the fortunetelling. Nonetheless, I offer the following thoughts as a conversation-starter.
With the recent speculation of Kim Jong-Il’s ill health, incapacitation and perhaps death, it might be useful to conceptualize the political shape of the Korean Peninsula [...]

Tutor to young Kim Jong-il from 1959, Kim Hyun-sik (76) defected in 1991 and is now a research professor at George Mason University in Virginia. After his defection, Prof. Kim’s entire family was executed via the gulag.
Prof. Kim’s memoir published in South Korea last year, “A 21st Century Ideological Nomad” (Korean), is the basis [...]

Update: Probably it would have been better to get these answers *before* announcing plans to delist North Korea and remove other trade barriers, as that is what the agreements actually called for:
North Korea did not answer U.S. suspicions of enriching uranium and proliferating technology when it released an inventory of its nuclear plans this [...]

If ever there was a time to drop the hammer on North Korea for habitually reneging on nuclear deals, now would be the time:
Speaking to reporters in Beijing Saturday, [Sigfried Hecker] said North Korean officials have told him they will not provide a full declaration of the country’s nuclear programs until other countries provide fuel [...]

Last Thursday, while addressing at the American Enterprise Institute, Jay Lefkowitz, President Bush’s Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea, stated that, “North Korea is not serious about disarming in a timely manner,” and “It is increasingly likely that North Korea will have the same nuclear status one year from now that it has [...]

While the comparison of Iraq now to Korea five decades ago is far from perfect, there are indeed several major points that make it an apt enough abstract example. For starters, after WWII until long after the Korean War, the accepted paradigm was that South Korea would remain a good, third-world, source of materials and/or [...]