Japanese leftists have accomplished the impossible - they are even more myopic than U.S. leftists. What possible difference would this have made if the Japanese government and the U.S. government sat on it for a month? This doesn't "put the brakes" on anything, it kicks the normalization talks into the ashcan of irrelevancy. They're in desperate denial, as the hopeful reference to "just didn't deny it" indicates.
Well, they needn't feel alone. All over the world leftists just got the props kicked out from under then with this one. The world isn't actually one whit more dangerous now than it was before the announcement, it's just that some folks just got their blinders torn off their heads.
"Pyongyang is cooperating with Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, whose leading members are South Korea, the United States and Japan. KEDO has reached an agreement on the provision of the light-water nuclear reactors by 2003, and, in return, North Korea has frozen its nuclear program. South Korea, which has promised to bear the lion's share of the reactor project cost estimated at US$4.5 billion, is asking the United States to put up at least a symbolic amount. The US administration, however, has said it can make no contribution to the construction cost as Congress has not appropriated the necessary budget. An official in Seoul, however, said that South Korea cannot drop its demand simply because of domestic problems in the United States. The US Congress has been delaying approval of the cost for the reactor project. South Korean officials said the U.S. refusal to share the reactor cost would make it difficult for them to obtain approval from the National Assembly for the South Korean share. Since the conclusion of the Supply Agreement in December 1995, six related protocols have come into effect and three rounds of expert-level negotiations have produced solid results. The ROK power company, Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO), is the prime contractor for this project and has as its responsibility the design, manufacture, procurement, construction and management of the reactors. On 19 August 1997 KEDO and North Korea held a groundbreaking ceremony to begin construction of two light-water reactors?. North Korea, most of all, has kept its pledge to freeze all of its nuclear facilities, including nuclear reactors and a reprocessing plant. The United States and North Korea have already taken measures to ease their economic embargoes against each other in order to pave the way for future economic exchanges necessary for carrying out the nuclear reactor project. A more imminent issue for the three