Why Did North Korea Develop Nuclear Weapons?

Scott Horton gives a very brief history of what happened (57m38s):

It was all George [W.] Bush's fault. [He] probably deliberately provoked them into doing that.

First, [the US] abnegated the Agreed Framework deal, then they announced a whole new round of sanctions, then they announced the Proliferation Security Initiative which said that we can seize all your boats on the high seas and do whatever we want with them [...] and then they announced the Nuclear Posture Review that said we just might attack you with nuclear weapons.

And only then did the North Koreans withdraw from their end of the Agreed Framework, announce they were withdrawing from the Non-Proliferation Treaty like in the deal it says you have to announce 6 months beforehand, and only then did they withdraw from the treaty, kick the IAEA out and start making nukes.

And i guess the thinking [in DC] - if you can call it thinking - was, don't worry, we'll be done in Baghdad and we’ll be ready to go to Pyongyang before they get their first nuke together, except that Oops instead we just essentially handed them an arsenal of nuclear weapons when they were perfectly happy within the Non-Proliferation Treaty as a threshold state under the Agreed Framework deal which America had never even lived up to our side of.

It just took Bush repudiating it and threatening them with an H-bomb first strike to make them withdraw from their end.

 More Scott Horton interviews about how and why North Korea acquired nuclear weapons
- 12/29/17 Gareth Porter on how the Bush administration sabotaged potential peace with North Korea
- 7/13/18 Gareth Porter on John Bolton and the North Korea Negotiations

What's so dangerous about war with North Korea?
- 12/18/17 Harry Kazianis on the potential for apocalyptic war with North Korea

What's so dangerous about nuclear weapons in general?
- Koen Swinkels' For How Long Can a World with Nuclear Weapons Avoid Nuclear Annihilation?: Not very long.
- Andrew Cockburn's How to Start a Nuclear War: The checks in place to prevent unauthorized people from starting a nuclear war don't work very well.
- William Langewiesche's How to Get a Nuclear Bomb: It is not impossibly difficult for terrorists to acquire nuclear weapons.
- John Hersey's Hiroshima: Classic 1946 New Yorker account of the horrors people in Hiroshima experienced the day the atomic bomb was dropped over their city.
- Daniel Elsberg's Doomsday Machine: First hand account of the dangers and madness of America’s 70 years long nuclear policy.
- Conn Hallinan's There Are Thousands of People Who Could Launch a Nuclear War: Thou-sands.
- Conn Hallinan's A Global Nuclear Winter: Avoiding the Unthinkable in India and Pakistan: Even a "limited", regional nuclear war has catastrophic consequences for the rest of the world. And such a regional nuclear war is much more likely than you think.
- Conn Hallinan's We May Be At a Greater Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe than During the Cold War: "Astounding increases in the danger of nuclear weapons have paralleled provocative foreign policy decisions that needlessly incite tensions between Washington and Moscow."