Kim Il Sung died in 1994 at the age of 82, not long after concluding the Agreed Framework with the Clinton administration. His son, Kim Jong Il, who had been groomed for the job by President Kim, took over the leadership of the country. He has followed in his father’s footsteps by pursuing an alternative path to a nuclear bomb, a gas centrifuge project that would produce enriched uranium. In October 2002, a senior US State Department official representing the Bush administration presented DPRK representatives in Pyongyang with charges that their government had a clandestine uranium enrichment programme. To everyone’s amazement, the North Koreans acknowledged that indeed they had such a programme and that they had a right to have it. Thus began the second North Korean nuclear crisis.