Once again, North Korea is playing a game of nuclear brinkmanship. In an eerie throwback to 1994, when a nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula pushed the United States and North Korea to the brink of war, Pyongyang has removed seals and disabled monitoring cameras at nuclear facilities that had been mothballed under the Agreed Framework with the U.S. Reports from South Korea say North Korean technicians are already working to repair a frozen reactor.

Clearly, all of this is in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. But in a strange twist of logic, the North Koreans are piling all the blame on the U.S. "It is America that has driven us to lift the nuclear freeze," said the Rodong Sinmun, the newspaper of the ruling Workers' Party. "If America wants to resolve the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula, it should sign a treaty of nonaggression with us."

Pyongyang is notorious for that kind of perverted rhetoric. It seems hooked, so to speak, on off-key diplomacy that makes a mockery of international treaties and agreements. Whether or not Pyongyang really means what it says, it is difficult, to say the least, to understand why it is trying to reactivate mothballed nuclear facilities in the face of international condemnation.