Bummer of a Day for Nuclear Arms Nonproliferation

A man in Seoul, South Korea, stops to take in news coverage of a North Korean rocket launch on April 5. (Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images)

Today wasn’t such a good day in the effort to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons. You probably heard that North Korea told United Nations inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to pack it up. Adding insult to injury, President Kim Jong Il and company said they’d be resuming operations at a factory responsible for producing weapons-grade plutonium.

Why? Turns out condemning the North Korean’s satellite launch really made them mad. You can read the full official statement released by the Korean Central News Agency here, but here’s a snippet : “Now that the six-party talks have turned into a platform for infringing upon the sovereignty of the DPRK and seeking to force the DPRK to disarm itself and bring down the system in it the DPRK will never participate in the talks any longer nor it will be bound to any agreement of the six-party talks.”

And, more ominously, “The DPRK will bolster its nuclear deterrent for self-defence in every way.” (The DPRK, by the way, is how North Korea refers to itself.)

Just a day before, things seemed so hopeful. The same news agency that carried today’s pronouncement was happily reporting on a floral basket that Mahmoud Abbas, chief of the Palestinian National Authority sent Kim Jong Il to commemorate the Day of the Sun.

And there’s even more nuke news from the Ukraine. The country’s security agency reported that it arrested three men for trying to sell 8 pounds (3.6 kilograms) of plutonium-239. The bad news? The suspects (two businessmen and a local government official) got their hands on plutonium. The good news? Ukraine security service stopped them, and the plutonium wasn’t plutonium at all, but rather americium. Whew.

More nuclear knowledge at HowStuffWorks.com:
How easy is it to steal a nuclear bomb?
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