North Korea Calls U.S. Sanctions Bluff With Nuclear Display

North Korea stunned U.S. scientists on a tour of its latest nuclear plant this month, showcasing technological advances that highlight the failure of sanctions to force Kim Jong Il’s regime back to disarmament talks.

"The control room was astonishingly modern," Stanford University professor Siegfried S. Hecker wrote in his Nov. 20 report of the visit eight days earlier to the main reactor site at Yongbyon. "We saw a modern, clean centrifuge plant of more than a thousand centrifuges," he said, a reference to the high-speed spinning devices that enrich uranium.