Aided by years of Soviet nuclear assistance, North Korea began building a 5-megawatt nuclear reactor in 1979 at Yongbyon, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). It was not until late 1985, however, that the country declared the existence of the facility to the IAEA as a condition of joining the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).
Nearly 20 years after joining the NPT, North Korea threatened to quit, setting off an 18-month crisis. In the spring of 1994 US President Bill Clinton signed an Agreed Framework with the country to put its nuclear ambitions on hold in exchange for US aid. This came after the US considered a strike against the nuclear facility and pushed the United Nations for sanctions on North Korea.
A light water reactor, unable to produce weapons-grade plutonium, was promised to North Korea as a part of the Agreed Framework for giving up its nuclear weapons. Construction on the project has since been suspended. In 2003, North Korea officially quit the NPT.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
