The North Koreans are playing more of their cards in order to get the bailout they so desperately need:

North Korea said on Wednesday that it will start an uranium-enrichment program, declaring for the first time that it intends to pursue a second project in addition to facilities that have provided it with plutonium for weapons.

The North also threatened to conduct a second nuclear test and launch an intercontinental ballistic missile unless the United Nations Security Council apologizes for its censure of the Communist state after its rocket test on April 5.

The North Korean decision, especially its decision to start an uranium-enrichment program, raises the stakes in the standoff between Pyongyang and Washington as a result of the rocket launch.

The Security Council adopted a unanimous statement on April 13 denouncing the launch as a violation of an earlier council resolution that banned Pyongyang from conducting nuclear and ballistic missile tests. The council called on United Nations member states to tighten sanctions _ a move that Pyongyang on Wednesday harshly criticized.

“Unless the U.N. Security Council immediately apologizes, we will have no choice but to take inevitable additional self-defense measures,” a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman told the North’s state-run news agency, KCNA. “This will include a nuclear test and a test of a intercontinental ballistic missile.”

The spokesman also said North Korea has decided to build new nuclear power plants. “And as the fist step of that process, we will without delay start technological development to secure our own supply of nuclear fuel,” he said, referring to its intention to enrich uranium. Engineers use the same technology to produce highly enriched uranium for nuclear bombs. [New York Times]

I wonder why the New York Times didn’t interview David Albright to ask him about the HEU program he has long said doesn’t exist?  Anyway the threat to build more nuclear power plants is something the else the New York Times didn’t expand on which is interesting considering the North Koreans have long been building a 50 megawatt reactor to replace the 5 megawatt Yongbyon reactor.  All these threats are something the North Koreans have all done before.

The only threat they didn’t issue yet that we have seen before is to proliferate their nuclear technology.  They probably will not issue this threat because that would give the South Koreans reason to join in the PSI program.

It will be interesting to see what provocation will bring the Obama administration to the bargaining table to pay them off.  With Bush it was the first nuclear test, will a second nuclear test be what brings President Obama to pay off Kim Jong-il as well?