For the Bush administration, the Geneva Agreed Framework, signed in 1994 by North Korea and the US with the aim of freezing the North’s nuclear activity and gradually decommissioning its graphite-moderated reactors, was an act of appeasement by the “naive” administration of President Bill Clinton. Bush’s administration preferred a harder line, using the so-called six-party talks, begun in 2003 and involving the US, China, Russia, Japan, and North and South Korea, to act almost as a pressure-cooker.