Plan C: Disarm Kim Jong Il Just by Pissing Him Off!

U.S. intelligence officials have warned President Obama and other senior American officials that North Korea intends to respond to the looming passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution this week — condemning the communist country for its recent nuclear and ballistic missile tests — with another nuclear test, FOX  News has learned.  [Fox News]

Could we be just six U.N. resolutions away from the complete nuclear disarmament of North Korea?  And you say the U.N. is worthless!

If only it were so easy:

The other three actions include the reprocessing of all of the North’s spent plutonium fuel rods into weapons-grade plutonium; a major escalation in the North’s uranium-enrichment program; and the launching of another Taepodong-2 intercontinental ballistic missile from the Yunsong military complex on the west coast of North Korea.

David Albright and Selig Harrison were unavailable for comment.

Don’t forget that 50 megawatt reactor, either, if their plan is to increase their plutonium production capacity.  I have yet to see any recent substantive analysis of that reactor’s capacity to reprocess plutonium, although a 2005 Washington Post report claimed that the North Koreans were as little as two years from completing it.

Interestingly, the report also notes that our satellites have detected no recent Taepodong II activity, although that may be because we’ve lost track of it.

3 Responses

  1. I don’t trust Hecker. He invested himself in Agreed Framework II and thus had an interest in denying that the 50 MW reactor was a threat, sight unseen (after all, if it was a threat despite the “disabling” of the 5 MW reactor, then what had we really gained?).

  2. Is your distrust of Hecker based on evidence that contradicts his account or based on his association with Agreed Framework II? It’s bad news if we can’t trust former directors of Los Alamos National Laboratory on nuclear technology issues.

    What about the guys at the IAEA? Are they trustworthy when they reported in September 2008 that there has been no construction at the 50 MW reactor since 2002?

    http://www.iaea.org/About/Policy/GC/GC52/GC52Documents/English/gc52-14_en.pdf