On Tuesday, the North Korean government announced via the state-controlled KCNA News Service that it plans to test a nuclear bomb sometime "in the future." If Kim Jong Il's communist regime were to follow through with this plan, it would certainly provoke the harshest reactions yet from the United States, China, Japan, and South Korea.

While the US State Department warned that a nuclear test would only serve to "further isolate" North Korea, the conservative daily Die Welt asserts that it is this isolation that has the country backed into a corner in the first place. The paper posits that North Korea is exhausting its "strongest weapon, namely to cause strife within the international community through provocations." Die Welt observes a weakening of North Korea's diplomatic position amid mounting tensions with Russia and China, a new Japanese prime minister with an aggressive anti-proliferation agenda, and the likely prospect of Ban Ki Moon, a South Korean, becoming the next General Secretary of the UN. Beyond the nuclear test, then, "there is not much left for Pyongyang to use as a threat."

The Financial Times Deutschland, on the other hand, describes North Korea's announcement as a test of Western resolve. The business daily says the threat could not have come at a more inopportune moment, given "a growing mountain of problems" in the West, including "failed world trade talks, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, an inability to bring the Lebanese conflict to a rapid conclusion, the perpetual crisis in the Sudanese Darfur region, and the failed effort to reform the United Nations itself." A North Korean nuclear test would destabilize the entire North Pacific region, which is why "the nuclear test is also a test for the international community."

Meanwhile, the resolve of Western diplomats is also being tested elsewhere. In a further complication of negotiations over Iran's nuclear ambitions, the government in Tehran has proposed that France organize and monitor the enrichment of uranium in Iran. Mohammad Saeidi, the deputy director of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, said during an interview with France Info radio that France could "create a consortium for the production in Iran of enriched uranium."

Western officials appeared largely unimpressed by the proposal, given that it falls short of the Security Council's demand that Iran freeze all of its enrichment activities. The New York Times quotes an anonymous French official who said that "this is not the first time the Iranians have tried to divide the international community,” and that their latest proposal "is totally excluded."