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(Updated) North Korea, Which Was Removed from the List of State Sponsors of Terrorism Last Year …

… has been caught smuggling weapons again, in flagrant violation of UNSCR 1874.

Update: The AP reports that the cargo included surface-to-air missile components, causing me to write a long, screedy update.

Update 2: More updates at the link above. More information suggests that the destination was Iran, and one major newspaper misreads UNSCR 1874, though the confusion is excusable. This appears to be the largest shipment of North Korean weapons intercepted since the passage of UNSCR 1874.

4 Responses

  1. Reports say that the weapons final destination was Pakistan. I am wondering if those surface to air missiles are intended to be given to the Taliban to target US military helicopters with?

  3. I am surprised that Iran can’t buy its weapons from the Russians directly, rather than getting rather less sophisticated North Korean weapons. Do we need a no-fly zone around the coast, like Iraq in the 1990s?

  4. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6955351.ece

    Well it appears Iran wasn’t after peaceful nuclear tech after all! Who knew???

    Iran is looking more and more like the final destination for these weapons. Iranian intellegence probably caught wind of the leak and wanted to take precautions. The document probably includes a lot of undisclosed information, locations and such, and now the evidence is undeniable.

    The cargo, specifically the SAM parts, makes me think Iran is worried about being attacked. They could have been planning to retrofit their AA defenses at the nuclear sites, to defend against possible Israeli air strike.

    If this is the case, what the Thai’s did was not just confiscate some arms. They very well could have changed the course of Iran’s nuclear development. Now all that’s left is to fuel the Falcon’s, Kfir’s, or whatever and light the burners