Category: North Korea

nKorea: “…this process does go up and down”

U.S. Plays Down North Korea Threat, Washington Times, August 28, 2008, Pg. 2, unattributed

The U.S. is shrugging off North Korea’s threat to backtrack on an agreement to dismantle its nuclear program.

North Korea says it stopped disabling its nuclear complex this month because the U.S. failed to remove it from a list of states that sponsor terrorism.

State Department spokesman Robert Wood said Wednesday that the U.S. “can’t get overly excited by a down in the situation right now, because this process does go up and down.”

North Korea‘s move threatens a six-nation agreement to abandon nuclear weapons in return for energy aid and political concessions.

Removing North Korea from the terrorism list was a U.S. concession, but the U.S. says it will not go forward until North Korea agrees to a plan to verify its nuclear declaration.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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S. Korean Tourist Shot by North Koreans

S. Korean Tourist Is Shot Dead In North, (Washington Post)…Blaine Harden, July 12, 2008
Pg. 9

A North Korean soldier shot dead a middle-aged South Korean housewife Friday after she walked into a restricted area near a mountain resort inside the communist North.

The killing of the 53-year-old tourist — who reportedly was shot twice from behind, in the chest and the left hip — 

Since Mount Kumgang was opened to outsiders in 1998, about 1.9 million people, nearly all of them South Koreans, have visited the resort on the east coast of the Korean Peninsula. It is one of two North Korean locations that are open — under tight rules — for foreign visits.

As of Friday morning, there were 1,200 to 1,300 tourists at the resort. They were to start leaving Friday night and would all be gone by Sunday, Hyundai Asan told news agencies. The other tourist operation in North Korea — at the former capital city Kaesong just north of the Demilitarized Zone that divides the two states — was not affected by Friday’s shooting and will remain open, according to Hyundai Asan.

North Korea has come to depend on South Korean aid, especially fertilizer, to prop up a centralized farming system that almost always fails to produce enough food to feed the country’s 23 million people.

N. Korea: Acknowledgements

Message To U.S. Preceded Nuclear Declaration By North Korea, (Washington Post)…Glenn Kessler, July 2, 2008
Pg. 7

Just days before North Korea delivered to China last week its long-awaited declaration on its plutonium-based nuclear programs, Pyongyang privately acknowledged the United States’ long-standing concerns about alleged uranium-enrichment activities and possible proliferation to Syria, U.S. and Asian officials said yesterday.

Before acknowledging U.S. concerns, North Korea had consistently denied having any kind of enrichment program.

The United States also agreed to pay North Korea $2.5 million — down from $5 million originally demanded by Pyongyang — for the televised destruction last week of the steel-reinforced concrete cooling tower attached to the Yongbyon nuclear facility, congressional sources said.

Last week, Bush set in motion a 45-day process under which North Korea will be removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

N Korea Policy

OPINION: A Grain Of Salt For Bolton’s View, Wall Street Journal, July 5, 2008

John Bolton’s charges about an alleged “total intellectual collapse” in current Bush administration policy on North Korea (“The Tragic End of Bush’s North Korea Policy,” op-ed, June 30) must be read in the context of the total policy collapse he and his colleagues participated in during the 2002-06 period.

During this time, North Korea moved from having no nuclear weapons and a shut-down reactor in October 2002 to having a tested nuclear weapon and possession of plutonium from 8,000 previously inaccessible spent fuel rods by October 2006. This was all done in the name of dismantling an allegedly “failed” U.S.-Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea Agreed Framework.

While such a policy may have been intellectually satisfying to Mr. Bolton, it represented a dangerous worsening of the security threat facing the U.S. The new deal is far from perfect, but Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her colleagues have wisely recognized the need to stop the bleeding from this prior policy disaster. We will now see what they can make of it.

Prof. James Clay Moltz, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, Calif.

N.Korea: More …

North Korea: Foreign Quid Wanted Before Providing The Nuclear Quo, (New York Times)…Associated Press, July 5, 2008, Pg. 9

North Korea said it would take no additional steps to dismantle its nuclear program until the United States and other negotiating partners provided all the oil and political benefits promised under an aid-for-disarmament agreement.

N.Korea Policy

The Tragic End Of Bush’s North Korea Policy
(Wall Street Journal)…John R. Bolton, June 30, 2008
Pg. 13

Maskirovka – the Soviet dark art of denial, deception and disguise – is alive and well in Pyongyang, years after the Soviet Union disappeared. Unfortunately, the Bush administration appears not to have gotten the word.

….  the administration has accepted a North Korean "declaration" about its nuclear program that is narrowly limited, incomplete and almost certainly dishonest in material respects. In exchange, President Bush personally declared that North Korea is no longer a state sponsor of terrorism or an enemy of the United States. 

North Korea has consecutively broken every major agreement with the U.S. since the North’s creation. 

N. Korea: Food Aid

North Korea Gets U.S. Food Aid, (Seattle Times)…Burt Herman, Associated Press, June 30, 2008

A U.S. ship carrying thousands of tons of food aid has arrived in North Korea, after the communist nation agreed to expanded international assistance for its impoverished people, the U.N. food agency said today.

N. Korea: First steps

Korean Nukes: Don’t Get Giddy, (New York Post)…Peter Brookes, June 27, 2008

NORTH Korea gave the world some good news this week – finally handing over a declaration about its nuclear program and promising to blow up the cooling tower at its Yongbyon nuclear facility. But don’t break out the best bubbly just yet.

These moves are only a first step in what is likely to be a drawn-out, slippery, pot-hole-filled road in a (possibly futile) attempt to roll back Kim Jong Il’s membership in the nuclear-weapons club.

But a welcome initial step. Pyongyang is six months late in handing over what’s supposed to be a complete and correct accounting of its nuclear programs – and you can bet we’re not going to get anything close to the Full Monty.

* It won’t have anything about the regime’s clandestine, uranium-based nuclear-weapons program.

* The declaration also won’t have any info on the regime’s nuclear-proliferation activities, such as its work with Damascus on a nuclear reactor at al Kibar in northern Syria (the one targeted in last September’s Israeli air raid).

* Finally, it won’t have the scoop on the size of the North Korean nuclear-weapons arsenal.