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God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions (Ecclesiastes 7:29)
| History | Nightmare Comes True |
| Nuclear Accidents | Iran Negotiator |
| Iran's Nuclear Threat | North Korea Talks |
My God, what have we done? - Robert Lewis
The co-pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb
History
(about.com)
On August 2, 1939, just before the beginning of World War II, Albert Einstein wrote to then President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Einstein and several other scientists told Roosevelt of efforts in Nazi Germany to purify uranium-235, which could be used to build an atomic bomb.
It was shortly thereafter that the United States Government began the serious undertaking known then only as "The Manhattan Project." Simply put, the Manhattan Project was committed to expediting research that would produce a viable atomic bomb.
The most complicated issue to be addressed in making of an atomic bomb was the production of ample amounts of "enriched" uranium to sustain a chain reaction. At the time, uranium-235 was very hard to extract. In fact, the ratio of conversion from uranium ore to uranium metal is 500:1. Compounding this, the one part of uranium that is finally refined from the ore is over 99% uranium-238, which is practically useless for an atomic bomb. To make the task even more difficult, the useful U-235 and nearly useless U-238 are isotopes, nearly identical in their chemical makeup. No ordinary chemical extraction method could separate them; only mechanical methods could work.
A massive enrichment laboratory/plant was constructed at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Harold C. Urey and his colleagues at Columbia University devised an extraction system that worked on the principle of gaseous diffusion, and Ernest O. Lawrence (inventor of the Cyclotron) at the University of California in Berkeley implemented a process involving magnetic separation of the two isotopes.
Next, a gas centrifuge was used to further separate the lighter U-235 from the heavier, non-fissionable U-238. Once all of these procedures had been completed, all that needed to be done was to put to the test the entire concept behind atomic fission ("splitting the atom," in layman's terms).
Over the course of six years, from 1939 to 1945, more than $2 billion was spent during the history of the Manhattan Project. The formulas for refining uranium and putting together a working atomic bomb were created and seen to their logical ends by some of the greatest minds of our time. Chief among the people who unleashed the power of the atom was J. Robert Oppenheimer, who oversaw the project from conception to completion.
Finally, the day came when all at Los Alamos would find out if "The Gadget" (code-named as such during its development) was going to be the colossal dud of the century or perhaps an end to the war. It all came down to a fateful morning in midsummer, 1945.
At 5:29:45 (Mountain War Time) on July 16, 1945, in a white blaze that stretched from the basin of the Jemez Mountains in northern New Mexico to the still-dark skies, "The Gadget" ushered in the Atomic Age. The light of the explosion then turned orange as the atomic fireball began shooting upwards at 360 feet per second, reddening and pulsing as it cooled. The characteristic mushroom cloud of radioactive vapor materialized at 30,000 feet. Beneath the cloud, all that remained of the soil at the blast site were fragments of jade green radioactive glass created by the heat of the reaction.
The brilliant light from the detonation pierced the early morning skies with such intensity that residents from a faraway neighboring community would swear that the sun came up twice that day. Even more astonishing is that a blind girl saw the flash 120 miles away.
Upon witnessing the explosion, its creators had mixed reactions. Isidor Rabi felt that the equilibrium in nature had been upset -- as if humankind had become a threat to the world it inhabited. J. Robert Oppenheimer, though ecstatic about the success of the project, quoted a remembered fragment from the Bhagavad Gita. "I am become Death," he said, "the destroyer of worlds."
After viewing the results several participants signed petitions against loosing the monster they had created, but their protests fell on deaf ears. The Jornada del Muerto of New Mexico would not be the last site on planet Earth to experience an atomic explosion.
Hiroshima
As many know, the atomic bomb has been used only twice in warfare. The first was at Hiroshima. A uranium bomb nicknamed "Little Boy" (despite weighing in at over four and a half tons) was dropped on Hiroshima August 6, 1945. The Aioi Bridge, one of 81 bridges connecting the seven-branched delta of the Ota River, was the target; ground zero was set at 1,980 feet. At 0815 hours, the bomb was dropped from the Enola Gay. It missed by only 800 feet. At 0816 hours, in an instant, 66,000 people were killed and 69,000 injured by a 10-kiloton atomic explosion.
The area of total vaporization from the atomic bomb blast measured one half mile in diameter; total destruction one mile in diameter; severe blast damage as much as two miles in diameter. Within a diameter of two and a half miles, everything flammable burned. The remaining area of the blast zone was riddled with serious blazes that stretched out to the final edge at a little over three miles in diameter.
Nagasaki
On August 9, 1945, Nagasaki fell to the same treatment. This time a Plutonium bomb nicknamed "Fat Man" was dropped on the city. Though "Fat Man" missed its target by over a mile and a half, it still leveled nearly half the city. In a split second, Nagasaki's population dropped from 422,000 to 383,000. Over 25,000 people were injured. Japan offered to surrender on August 10, 1945.
Notable nuclear accidents
(Compton' s Home Library)
Oct 7, 1957
A fire in the Windscale plutonium production reactor N of Liverpool, England, spread radioactive material throughout the countryside. In 1983, the British government said that 39 people had probably died of cancer as a result of the accident.
1957
A chemical explosion in Kasli, USSR (now in Russia), in tanks containing nuclear waste, spread radioactive material and forced a major evacuation.
Jan 3, 1961
An experimental reactor at a federal installation near Idaho Falls, ID, killed 3 workers--the only deaths in U.S. reactor operations. The plant had high radiation levels, but damage was contained.
Oct 5, 1966
A sodium cooling system malfunction caused a partial core meltdown at the Enrico Fermi demonstration breeder reactor, located near Detroit, MI. Radiation was contained.
Jan 21, 1969
A coolant malfunction from an experimental underground reactor at Lucens Vad, Switzerland, resulted in the release of a large amount of radiation into a cavern, which was then sealed.
Mar 22, 1975
A technician checking for air leaks with a lighted candle caused a $100 million fire at the Brown's Ferry reactor in Decatur, AL. The fire burned out electrical controls, lowering the cooling water to dangerous levels.
Mar 28, 1979
The worst commercial nuclear accident in the U.S. occurred as equipment failures and human mistakes led to a loss of coolant and a partial core meltdown at the Three Mile Island reactor in Middletown, PA.
Feb 11, 1981
Eight workers were contaminated when more than 100,000 gallons of radioactive coolant leaked into the containment building of the TVA's Sequoyah 1 plant in Tennessee.
Apr 25, 1981
Some 100 workers were exposed to radioactive material during repairs of a nuclear plant at Tsuruga, Japan.
Jan 6, 1986
A cylinder of nuclear material burst after being improperly heated at a Kerr-McGee plant at Gore, OK. One worker died, and 100 were hospitalized.
Apr 26, 1986
In the worst accident in the history of the nuclear power industry, fires and explosions resulting from an unauthorized experiment conducted at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant near Kiev, USSR (now in Ukraine), left at least 31 people dead in the immediate aftermath of the disaster and spread significant quantities of radioactive material over much of Europe. An estimated 135,000 people were evacuated from areas around Chernobyl, some of which were rendered uninhabitable for years. As a result of the radiation that was released into the atmosphere, tens of thousands of excess cancer deaths (as well as increased rates of birth defects) were expected in succeeding decades.
Iran's Threat
Massimo Calebresi (Time Magazine) Mar 08 2003
With war in Iraq looming and North Korea defiantly pursuing its own nuclear program, the last thing President Bush needs is another nuclear crisis. But that is what he may soon face in Iran. On a visit last month to Tehran, International Atomic Energy Agency director Mohamed ElBaradei announced he had discovered that Iran was constructing a facility to enrich uranium — a key component of advanced nuclear weapons — near Natanz. But diplomatic sources tell TIME the plant is much further along than previously revealed. The sources say work on the plant is "extremely advanced" and involves "hundreds" of gas centrifuges ready to produce enriched uranium and "the parts for a thousand others ready to be assembled."
Iran announced last week that it intends to activate a uranium conversion facility near Isfahan (under IAEA safeguards), a step that produces the uranium hexafluoride gas used in the enrichment process. Sources tell Time the IAEA has concluded that Iran actually introduced uranium hexafluoride gas into some centrifuges at an undisclosed location to test their ability to work. That would be a blatant violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which Iran is a signatory.
The IAEA declined to comment. A senior State department official said he believed El Baradei was trying to resolve the issue behind the scenes before going public. But experts say the new discoveries are very serious and should be handled in public. "If Iran were found to have an operating centrifuge, it would be a direct violation [of the non-proliferation treaty] and is something that would need immediately to be referred to the United Nations Security Council for action," says Jon Wolfstahl of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Iran insists that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes and told elBaradei that Tehran intends to bring all of its programs under IAEA safeguards. U.S. officials have said repeatedly they believe Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons.
The new discoveries could destabilize a region already dangerously on edge in anticipation of war in Iraq. Israel — which destroyed an Iraqi nuclear plant in Osirak in a 1981 raid — is deeply alarmed by the developments. "It's a huge concern," says one Israeli official. "Iran is a regime that denies Israel's right to exist in any borders and is a principal sponsor of Hezbollah. If that regime were able to achieve a nuclear potential it would be extremely dangerous." Israel will not take the "Osirak option" off the table, the official says, but "would prefer that this issue be solved in other ways."
The revelations come at a particularly bad time for Washington, which is locked in a battle to gain U.N. approval for an attack on Iraq and to build consensus among its allies for a multilateral approach to the crisis in North Korea. Critics of the Administration say Bush's hard public line against the so-called "Axis of Evil," combined with the threatened war with Iraq, have acted as a spur to both Iran and North Korea to accelerate their nuclear programs. "If those countries didn't have much incentive or motivation before, they certainly did after the Axis of Evil statement," says one western diplomat familiar with the Iranian and North Korean programs. The Administration counters that both programs have been underway for many years.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Iranian President)
"Israel should be wiped off the map"
"Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation's fury”
“There is no doubt that the new wave (of attacks) in Palestine will wipe off this stigma (Israel) from the face of the Islamic world, ... The World without Zionism.”
Nightmare comes true
Bill Powell (Time Magazine) Monday, Oct 09, 2006
North Korea, defying urgent pleas and intense pressure from the rest of the world, successfully tested a nuclear bomb this morning at a site near the city of Kilju in country's northeast, about 400km from the capital Pyongyang. The test moves the issue of Pyongyang's nuclear capability into a tense new phase. For more than a decade, the United States and North Korea's neighbors in east Asia—South Korea, Japan China and Russia—have worked to get Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear ambitions. Those efforts have proved fruitless, and indeed the timing of the North's test today seemed particularly pointed. On Sunday, Shinzo Abe, Japan's new prime minister, visited Beijing, where he and Chinese premier Hu Jintao insisted that the North must not be allowed to test a nuclear bomb. Abe is in Seoul today for talks with President Roh Moo Hyun.
Pyongyang's ability to "weaponize" its nuclear materials—to place a bomb on a missile for delivery—is still uncertain. So is the capability of its longest-range missiles: this summer, in defiance of the international community, Pyongyang test fired an intercontinental ballistic missile that analysts said could reach Alaska or Hawaii. That test failed, but a test of a shorter range missile—one that could easily reach Japan—was successful.
What the U.S. and its partners in the so-called six party talks with Pyongyang will do now is not clear. The U.S., Japan, China , South Korea and Russia have struggled to present Pyongyang with a united front in efforts to get it to stand down on its nuclear program. Washington and Tokyo have called for—and in some cases, implemented—tough sanctions against Pyongyang for its refusal to negotiate. South Korea and China—on whom the North depends for critical oil supplies—have sought a less confrontational approach to Pyongyang, in part because both would bear the brunt of any potential economic collapse in North Korea.
But this summer it was evident that even Beijing's patience with North Korea's dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, was wearing thin. In late July, China agreed to freeze accounts at a Macau-based bank that Washington claims was being used by senior North Korean officials to launder tens of millions of dollars. In recent weeks, both South Korean and U.S. officials told TIME that they believed the sanctions were "really biting," as one US source put it, and had "infuriated" the North Korean regime. Many analysts speculated, in fact, that the North's test threats were in part a display of its anger over the sanctions.
The North's claim of a successful test now moves the issue squarely back into Washington's court. Pyongyang wants direct talks with the U.S., a removal of the sanctions and a range of security guarantees in return for backing off its nuclear program. In a tough speech last week, the U.S. State Department's point man on the North Korean nuclear issue, Ambassador Christopher Hill, said the U.S. could not live with a nuclear test. What precisely that means is something that Washington, in consultation with Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo, will now be trying to figure out. Few analysts believe a viable military option exists. The potential costs, including a likely North Korean retaliation against South Korea, are too huge to contemplate. Beijing, to be sure, did not want Pyongyang to test—and North Korea's defiance is a distinct loss of face for China, the one country thought to have some influence in North Korea. According to Kurt Campbell, director of the International Security Program at Washington's Center for International Security, the test could also force Japan and South Korea to potentially increase their defence spending and even push the U.S. to strengthen its security commitment to the area—neither of which China wants.
But the test may not alter China's basic calculus when it comes to Pyongyang: most analysts believe that, more than anything, Beijing wants stability on its long border with the North. Alexandre Mansourov, a North Korea expert at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Hawaii, warns that China's response could be milder than expected: "They'll want slap symbolic sanctions, but I don't think the Chinese will vote for tough language or enforce any sanctions the U.N. Security Council decides to pass." If that's true, the ability of the outside world to register its displeasure with Pyongyang may be limited.
Kim Jong-il (North Korean Leader)
Iran: No threat to Isreal
Source: CNN February 11, 2007
Munich, Germany (AP) -- Iran's nuclear program is not a threat to Israel and the country is prepared to settle all outstanding issues with the International Atomic Energy Agency within three weeks, its top nuclear negotiator said Sunday.
Ali Larijani, speaking at a forum that gathered the world's top security officials, said Iran doesn't have aggressive intentions toward any nation.
"That Iran is willing to threaten Israel is wrong," Larijani said. "We pose no threat and if we are conducting nuclear research and development we are no threat to Israel. We have no intention of aggression against any country."
In Israel, Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev dismissed Larijani's comments, saying Iran's government was trying to convince the international community to believe that their intentions are benign. "The fact is that they have failed in this attempt and there is a wall-to-wall consensus that the Iranian nuclear program is indeed military and aggressive and a threat to world peace."
Iran insists it will not give up uranium enrichment, saying it is pursuing the technology only to generate energy. The United States and some of its allies fear the Islamic republic is more interested in enrichment's other application -- creating the fissile core of nuclear warheads.
The IAEA, led by Mohamed ElBaradei, has said it has found no evidence that Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons. But the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog agency has suspended some aid to Iran and criticized the country for concealing certain nuclear activities and failing to answer questions about its program.
"I have written to Mr. ElBaradei to say we are ready to within three weeks to have the modality to solve all the outstanding issues with you," Larijani said at the forum.
On Friday, the IAEA suspended nearly half the technical aid it provides to Iran, a symbolically significant punishment for nuclear defiance that only North Korea and Saddam Hussein's Iraq had faced in the past.
That decision was in line with U.N. Security Council sanctions imposed on Iran for its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment. The suspension must still be approved by the 35 countries on the IAEA's governing board.
"Today we announce to you that the political will of Iran is aimed at the negotiated settlement of the case and we don't want to aggravate the situation in our region," Larijani said. "We know that this issue can be settled in a constructive dialogue and we welcome that."
ElBaradei's Friday report to board members called for the full or partial suspension of 18 projects that it said could be misused to create nuclear weapons. The agency had already suspended aid to Iran in five instances last month.
While the IAEA programs do not involve significant amounts of money, a senior U.N. official familiar with Iran's file said the suspensions carry "symbolic significance" because they are part of Security Council sanctions.
Iran gets IAEA technical aid for 15 projects and 40 more involving multiple other countries. In projects involving other nations, only Iran was affected by the suspensions.
The United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany all want Iran to stop its enrichment program. But their approaches have differed over the past year, often straining the joint effort.
Last year, Moscow proposed that Iran move its enrichment work to Russian territory, where it could be better monitored, to alleviate international suspicions.
Larijani said Iran did not reject the Kremlin's plan.
"We would have to have necessary guarantees in place that the fuel would be supplied," he said. "We would not be against such proposals."
In a wide-ranging speech, Larijani blamed the U.S. occupation of Iraq for fomenting terrorism in the region, and said Tehran's influence was having a stabilizing effect on the situation in that country.
"Terrorists are justifying their presence in Iraq because of the occupation, but the Americans are forced to increase the size of their forces because of terrorists. How do we break this vicious cycle?"
Larijani said the violence in Iraq was limited mainly to regions where the main U.S. garrisons were based.
"The secure parts of Iraq have two characteristics -- they border Iran and in those provinces U.S. troops are not present," he said.
N. Korea takes the bait
By Bill Powell (Time Magazine) Feb. 15, 2007
For all of its pomp and circumstance—the police-escorted limousines cruising unimpeded through capital cities, the grand conference rooms, the hordes of assistants and aides—international diplomacy can be a grindingly tough and draining business. For three years, Christopher Hill, the lead U.S. negotiator in the six-party talks on denuclearizing North Korea, had sought a Grand Bargain with Pyongyang, only to be frustrated at every turn. Finally, in the early hours of Feb. 13, that changed. Thanks in part to the Chinese, who played the stern taskmaster during the latest round of negotiations in Beijing ("they kept us up very late," Hill later joked), the State Department diplomat was able to return to his hotel shortly before 3 a.m. with a deal in hand. Hill wasn't the only U.S. official consumed by the talks. His boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, called him 12 times in three days to check the progress of negotiations. "He thought he had a tentative agreement," Rice told reporters at a Feb. 13 press conference in Washington. "And I called him at 4:15 this morning just to make sure."
When dealing with North Korea, "making sure" is never a bad idea. Going back to 1994, when the Clinton Administration cajoled Pyongyang into promising to abandon its nuclear-weapons program, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il has repeatedly made and then reneged on such accords. But for the Bush Administration, whose officials had once speculated openly about the possibility of forcing Kim from power by cutting off his regime from aid and trade, the agreement signed on Tuesday represented a victory—albeit a small one. Now, the immediate question it faces is simple: Have the U.S. and its four negotiating partners—South Korea, China, Russia and Japan—laid a solid foundation for a lasting deal on North Korea's nukes, or is this agreement, as one former U.S. negotiator puts it, "just another false start, destined to end badly?"
Despite its obvious need for a diplomatic success somewhere, anywhere, given the quagmire in Iraq and the stalemate over Iran's purported nuclear-weapons program, the Administration could not be accused of overhyping what it got in Beijing. This was not a comprehensive solution that could bring about a nuclear-free Korean peninsula—a goal that, Bush aides say, the President has eagerly sought. But it was, Washington insists, an important first step toward that goal—"an early harvest," as U.S. negotiators like to call it. "Little plants come up," Hill says, "and you harvest those immediately."
The preliminary nature of the deal is clear enough: North Korea agreed to shut down its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, where it's believed to have produced the fissile material needed to make the six to 10 nuclear weapons Kim is estimated to possess. Pyongyang has also promised to allow international inspectors into the country to verify compliance within 60 days. In return, the North is to receive an emergency shipment of 50,000 tons of fuel oil from the U.S., China, Russia and South Korea. The oil is desperately needed to run electric power plants in the impoverished land. If the North permanently disables the reactor, the deal calls for another 950,000 tons of oil to be donated.
Beyond that, it's less clear what North Korea has conceded. The agreement holds out the possibility of an array of unspecified economic and humanitarian assistance flowing to the North, as well as the prospect that the U.S. will remove the country from its list of terrorist-sponsoring states, end its trade sanctions and eventually enter talks to normalize relations. Meanwhile, Pyongyang agreed "to discuss all of its nuclear programs," including any stockpiles of plutonium already gleaned from the Yongbyon reactor. At her Feb. 13 press conference, Rice emphasized the phrase "all nuclear programs." She says the U.S. and its partners want the North to dismantle both its plutonium-based weapons program and a suspected uranium-enrichment program. "Everybody understands what 'all' means," she says. But Pyongyang, after first admitting to the uranium program when confronted about it by the U.S. in 2002, has since denied its existence—and may well have hidden it away deep inside a mountain somewhere in the countryside. Rice insisted that "we're going to pursue the issue of the highly enriched-uranium program." But if Kim decides not to "discuss" this issue, as the agreement demands, how will the U.S. and its partners react?
The agreement is also silent—ominously so, critics believe—on the subject of the North's existing nuclear weapons. The question of whether Pyongyang has them is no longer a matter of conjecture: last October the North tested a nuclear weapon (albeit with mixed success), dramatically raising the stakes in the standoff with the U.S. and its allies. The fact that Kim's existing nuclear stockpile is not mentioned in the latest agreement "is probably not an oversight," says Gary Samore, who was head of the counterproliferation program at the U.S. National Security Council (NSC) under Clinton. "That's an indication that the North Koreans are not going to be willing to give up their existing capabilities."
It's hard to see why they would do so. Ever since Bush's speech in 2002 labeling North Korea a member of the "axis of evil," Kim has believed "he has a big, fat target painted on his back," says a former U.S. diplomat. "Kim believes that having a few nukes in his pocket is the ultimate guarantee that no one will try to topple his regime militarily. He's probably right about that, and no matter how much fuel oil or diplomatic goodies we send his way, he's not going to negotiate that away."
As Bush's critics see it, that's where the latest disarmament deal falls short. Former Clinton Administration officials say the agreement is a close facsimile of the Agreed Framework signed by Washington and Pyongyang in 1994. That deal called for the North to halt nuclear-weapons development in return for two light-water nuclear-power plants, which are difficult to use to generate fissile material for bombs. Clinton's presidency ended before the power plants could be completed and the projects today are derelict—evidence, in Pyongyang's eyes, of Washington's bad faith. But those who defend the Agreed Framework say all Bush had to do upon taking office was follow through, and several years of dangerous saber rattling in Northeast Asia could have been avoided. Says Graham Allison, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense under Clinton: "The bad news is that this is four years, eight bombs' worth of plutonium and one nuclear test" after the Bush Administration veered from the course set by the Agreed Framework.
Gibes from Clintonites over the recent deal are to be expected. But criticism has come from the right as well as the left. John Bolton, Bush's former ambassador to the U.N. and his lead negotiator in the early rounds of the six-party talks, told CNN the U.S. has sent a perilous signal to proliferators that they'll be rewarded for bad behavior. "It's a bad deal," Bolton declared.
State Department officials deny they've let North Korea off the hook. "He's just wrong," Rice sniffed in response to Bolton's criticisms. The Administration argues that their deal is much stronger than the one negotiated in '94 because it effectively isolates Kim. The Agreed Framework was bilateral, the argument goes, whereas this time North Korea's neighbors—including its closest ally and major benefactor, China—are signatories to the deal, which should force Pyongyang to keep its promises and continue to bargain in good faith. The Chinese were infuriated by Kim's October nuclear blast; President Hu Jintao had publicly warned against such a test. This "deal has muscle," argues Michael Green, a former NSC adviser on East Asian affairs in the Bush Administration, "because the Chinese have been very unhappy with the North's provocations."
Most of the deal's critics, in fact, concede that it is at least better than the status quo: a North Korea bent on producing more weapons. Former Clinton negotiator Dan Poneman likened the latest agreement to putting a "tourniquet" on the plutonium program. If the Yongbyon reactor is shut down, the North's ability to make more plutonium-fueled nukes is crippled. And although Pyongyang has not agreed to dismantle its nuclear program, a path for further negotiations has been set. This is likely the best deal the U.S. could get right now, and the fact that Bush's team took it means "they have come to face reality," says former NSC adviser Samore, rather than holding out for greater concessions that seemed increasingly unfeasible.
In two months, Rice and other foreign ministers will gather in Beijing to assess whether both sides have lived up to their initial promises. If they have, Rice says she will meet face-to-face with her North Korean counterpart for the first time during Bush's presidency. That could set the stage for historic discussions about normalizing relations between two implacable enemies. Indeed, the Administration's rhetoric about seeking a sweeping solution to the North Korea nuclear quagmire—with regime change as one of its options—has faded. Instead, the U.S. now seems willing to take a more modest, measured approach in pursuit of the ultimate goal of a denuclearized North. The first step was to halt the forward progress of Kim's nuclear program. It will be harder getting him to reverse course.
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