North Korea's high-stakes nuclear gamesmanship

What, exactly, does North Korea have to gain by continuing to violate UN Security Council resolutions and baiting the United States into a confrontation on nuclear development? That's the question today after Pyongyang announced it would begin enriching uranium as an addition to its known plutonium-enrichment program unless UN sanctions were lifted, according to the New York Times. North Korea said it also would conduct additional nuclear weapon and ballistic missile tests if the UN did not apologize for the Security Council's April 13 condemnation of its most recent missile test and threat to tighten economic sanctions, which it said it considered "a declaration of war." Pyongyang has managed to exact some concessions from Washington, including high-level dialogue and shipments of food for its impoverished people, with earlier threats, but it is hard to see what Pyongyang wants now. North Korea was impoverished by the collapse of the Soviet bloc, which cut its international trade lifeline, and has been depending on shipments of food from the West to feed its people. Of course, the billions of dollars it is pouring into its weapons research would feed a lot of people if redirected into domestic programs. Instead, the North denounced the Security Council as “a tool for the U.S. highhanded and arbitrary practices” and refused to acknowledge its continuing activities, which the United States believes includes helping Syria with its nuclear research. A spokesman for the U.S. State Department, Fred Lash, said Wednesday that the Security Council resolution was “balanced and appropriate.” “We certainly call on North Korea, as we have in the past, to uphold its commitments” under a Sept. 19, 2005, joint statement of six-party talks and a 2006 Security Council imposing sanctions, the Times said. “We remain committed to achieving the verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, hopefully through the six-party talks,” Lash said. “We urge them, as we always do, to return to the table.”

Financial crisis claims another government

Today's collapse of Czechoslovokia's center-right government should come as another warning to the United States and the world's other rich nations that a lot more will have to be done before the world economic system gets restored to health. Particularly in Europe, where former Soviet-dominated countries and former Soviet republics have been struggling for years to qualify for admission to the common currency of the European Union, the floundering world economy is a threat to stability, trade and, ultimately, the post-USSR peace. Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek offered to resign Tuesday after losing the confidence question by one vote. His center-right minority government may stay on until June when its turn as rotating chair of the EU ends, according to the Reuters international news service. Of course, the real problem is that the relatively newly independent countries are, in fact, relatively newly independent countries, and their former centrally planned economies are still young. Without plenty of support from the older and richer EU members, these states are destined to remain second-class members of the economic alliance. Their economies simply are not capable of generating the income necessary for maintaining European-style economies, which are a mix of the capitalist and central-planning models. It's expensive to guarantee state-paid health care for tens of millions of citizens, to pay extensive unemployment benefits to those who are not working and to provide free college educations for those who qualify. Despite its economic difficulties, Czechoslovakia has not had to bail out its banks, like the United States and other major Western nations have done.