Robert Farley says that reaching an accord with North Korea on nuclear-weapons development was a difficult proposition even before the recent revelations.
The existence of a uranium-enrichment program parallel to North Korea’s plutonium efforts had been hinted at since 2002. North Korea had intermittently denied the existence of such a program while reaffirming its right to enrich uranium. U.S. suspicions about uranium enrichment brought about the collapse of the Agreed Framework in 2002, which would have set up an exchange of energy and other goods in return for a North Korean promise to halt its nuclear program. However, both this facility and the certainty of the program’s progress came as a surprise to many analysts.
