They figure if Iran can do it without consequences, so can they:
North Korea said Tuesday it has stopped disabling its nuclear reactor and will consider restoring the plutonium-producing facility in anger over Washington’s failure to remove it from the U.S. list of terror sponsors.
The North’s statement marks the emergence of the biggest hurdle yet to the communist nation’s denuclearization process and is expected to escalate tension in the nuclear talks involving China, Japan, the two Koreas, the U.S. and Russia.
Pyongyang’s Foreign Ministry said it suspended the disablement work at the reactor and other facilities at its Yongbyon nuclear complex as of Aug. 14 because the U.S. did not keep its promise to delist Pyongyang as a terror sponsor under last year’s deal.
Maybe that’s because the little gargoyles still sponsor terrorism, are duplicitious when it comes to their WMD program, and are generally unfucking trustworthy.
……That has angered Pyongyang. The North’s state media have issued a series of commentaries blasting the U.S., and the Foreign Ministry last week threatened that the country would bolster its “war deterrent” — a euphemism for its nuclear programs — as it condemned U.S.-South Korea military exercises.
This is the meat of the issue:
……Cheong Seong-chang, a North Korea expert at the private Sejong Institute in South Korea, said the latest statement appeared to be aimed at pressuring Washington to lower its demands regarding verification and remove the North from the terror list.
I wouldn’t ‘trust’ them even if we did ‘verify’.