North Korea drops a uranium bombshell

Suddenly, North Korea's peace offensive has exploded in a mushroom cloud with word from Pyongyang that the North's nuclear wizards are about to enter "the completion stage" of their program to develop nuclear warheads with highly enriched uranium. Pyongyang said on Friday it was in the final stage of enriching uranium, a process that would give it a path to making nuclear weapons other than plutonium-based devices. For those who may have forgotten the history, it was the revelation nearly seven years ago that North Korea had a highly enriched uranium program entirely separate from its plutonium program at its complex at Yongbyon that set in motion the sequence that finally detonated the 1994 Geneva framework agreement. Under that agreement, North Korea had shut down its experimental five-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon while teams of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) rotated in and out of the North to confirm the program was really suspended. But all the while, as US intelligence had gathered from multiple sources, including spy satellites, the network of Abdul Qadeer Khan - the "father" of the Pakistan atomic bomb - and exchanges between North Korea and Iran, the North was continuing its program in enriched uranium.