This photo shows North Korea's spent nuclear fuel rods kept in a cooling pond at its nuclear facilities in Yongbyon.

To Kim Jong Il's apparent chagrin, the Bush administration had little interest in continuing the thawing of relations that had begun under President Clinton. The North Korean dictator, according to a Russian diplomat who spent time with him, was particularly offended by Bush's lumping of North Korea with Iran and Iraq in the "Axis of Evil" — even though North Korea's history as a terrorism sponsor far outstripped that of the Saddam Hussein regime.

In October, 2002, the animus erupted into a crisis when North Korea acknowledged to the United States that it still had an active nuclear weapons development program, in violation of an agreement that the two nations had made in 1994. The North Korean regime subsequently expelled international nuclear inspectors and announced that it was reprocessing spent nuclear-reactor fuel rods into plutonium for making weapons.

In the spring of 2003, as the United States prepared to go to war against Iraq, the North Korean regime issued bellicose public statements indicating that it didn't intend to suffer the same fate as Saddam Hussein, at least not without a bloody fight. The North Koreans demanded direct talks and a nonaggression pact with the United States as the price for putting their nuclear aspirations on hold.

The Bush administration demurred at giving Kim Jong Il a prestige boost and held out for a multinational summit involving Russia, Japan and China as well. Finally, in August 2003, the two countries struck a compromise in which North Korea agreed to a multinational summit, with the proviso that U.S. and North Korean diplomats also would meet privately during the event.

In any case, with reports suggesting that North Korea is developing a missile that may be capable of reaching some parts of the United States, along with the fact that with 700,000 troops it has one of the largest standing armies in the world, the stakes are higher than ever.