Will North Korea be the Obama administration's first Asian crisis? Pyongyang has been cranking up its bellicose rhetoric, declaring recently that it would maintain its 'status as a nuclear weapons state' and 'smash' South Korea's government in an 'all-out confrontation' for tying aid to disarmament.
Of course, this is vintage North Korean sabre-rattling and a tactic it has often used in the past. But, this time, is it just designed to raise the stakes and improve Pyongyang's bargaining leverage as it prepares to open negotiations with the administration of US President Barack Obama? Or does it represent a defiant resetting of the North's negotiating terms, based on its determination to keep nuclear arms until the regime feels secure?
After the latest of a series of visits to North Korea, Selig Harrison, director of the Asia programme at the Centre for International Policy in Washington, said in Seoul on January 17 that senior North Korean officials had told him that enough plutonium for four or five nuclear bombs has been 'weaponised'. He said the officials had not defined what 'weaponised' meant, but the implication was that they had built nuclear arms.
If this is not a bluff, it would mean that Pyongyang plans to hold onto nuclear weapons despite an agreement it signed with China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States in 2005 in which it promised to abandon them in exchange for economic and political incentives.
This deal was worked out in the framework of the six-party negotiations chaired by China. They have made only fitful progress and stalled towards the end of last year. Some analysts concluded that Pyongyang was hoping for a better deal from Mr Obama than it could get from the outgoing Bush administration.
There is no sign of this happening. The US, under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, insisted that North Korea give up its pursuit of nuclear weapons before Washington would agree to diplomatic ties.