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January 22, 2009

Gullible’s Travels: The Selective Disbelief of Selig S. Harrison

Here’s the latest installment of North Korea’s hostile policy: The North Korean military declared an “all-out confrontational posture” against South Korea on Saturday as an American scholar said North Korean officials told him they had “weaponized” enough plutonium for roughly four or five nuclear bombs. American intelligence officials have previously estimated that the North had harvested enough fuel for six or more bombs, although it has never been clear whether the North constructed the weapons. The scholar, Selig S. Harrison,...

Categories Media Criticism/Proliferation/Washington Views/WMD
January 17, 2009

For the Thousandth Time, Secretary Rice ….

Ad infinitum, ad nauseum, ad eternitum, ad apocalyptum, North Korea will never negotiate away its nuclear weapons, no matter what it promises our gullible diplomats in treaties or agreed frameworks: In an apparent message to U.S. President-elect Barack Obama who will take office next week, North Korea said Saturday it may not give up its nuclear weapons even if Washington normalizes relations with it. “Normalization of diplomatic relations and the nuclear issue are entirely different issues,” a spokesman for the...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks/WMD
January 17, 2009

Hostile Policy Not Quite Dead

History will record that President Bush experienced just one brief glint of success at influencing the North Koreans during his entire presidency. Naturally, our State Department had nothing to do with it. In fact, when State realized that another cabinet department (Treasury) might actually solve the North Korean problem once and for all, it dove in to rescue failure from the jaws of success. Most people in Washington tend to think in terms of dealing with national security threats in...

Categories NK Economics/Proliferation/WMD
January 16, 2009

That’s Weapons Grade Uranium

The debate about North Korea’s uranium cheat should be over with even Hillary Clinton’s acknowledgment of it, but Condi Rice’s statement that North Korea possesses some unknown quantity of weapons-grade, highly enriched uranium isn’t a fact we should just gloss over. That’s the first time I’ve seen that reported. Update: The Daily NK has more recent statements from the Administration on this topic, including from President Bush and Vice-President Cheney. The President stated during the last press conference of his...

Categories Proliferation/WMD
November 21, 2008

You Don’t Say

The U.N. is beginning to suspect that those Syrians and North Koreans may have been up to something suspicious after all. “It cannot be excluded” that the Syrian facility “was intended for non-nuclear use,” the IAEA report says.However, it continues, “The features of the building . . . along with the connectivity of the site to adequate pumping capacity of cooling water, are similar to what may be found in connection with a reactor site.” Pre-attack photographs show a “containment...

Categories Proliferation/WMD
November 2, 2008

Yet again, Kim Jong Il caught proliferating right under Chris Hill’s nose.

Sometimes, I wonder why I even bother. India blocked a North Korean plane from delivering cargo to Iran in August, responding to a U.S. request based on fears about the spread of weapons of mass destruction. This, nine weeks before President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, ostensibly to reward it for some sort of good behavior. According to the Western and Asian officials, the North Korean plane, an Ilyushin-62 long-range jet owned by...

Categories "United" Nations/Proliferation/WMD
October 9, 2008

S. Korean JCS Chair: N. Korea Building Lighter Nuclear Warheads for Missiles

You might have thought that an agreement whose nominal objective is nuclear disarmament ought to be reasonably clear about dismantling, disabling, or dissing those arms in some specific way. If so, you thought wrong, and here are the consequences of that. In fact, Chris Hill’s February 2007 disarmament deal was intentionally vague about North Korea’s existing nuclear arsenal. Until this summer, State had insisted that the North’s nuclear weapons were covered by the phrase “all nuclear programs,” although North Korea’s...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/NK Military/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks/U.S. & Korea/WMD
September 17, 2008

Ho Hum, North Korea Violates 2 More U.N. Resolutions, World Yawns

Remember that fancy new North Korean missile test site that was in the news the other day?  North Korea has reportedly conducted an engine ignition test for a long-range missile, presumably the Taepodong-2 missile with a range of 6,700 km, at a new long-range missile test site under construction in Dongchang-li, North Pyongan Province. For the test, the rocket engine of a missile is laid out horizontally at the test site and ignited to test its performance. The test confirms...

Categories "United" Nations/Proliferation/WMD
June 30, 2008

The New York Times: Now 33% as Coherent as Dick Cheney!

Dick Cheney  and the New York Times have one thing in common:  both have  opinions about  the latest version of  Bush’s  North Korea policy: Cheney froze, according to four of the participants at the Old Executive Office Building meeting. For more than 30 minutes he had been talking and answering questions, without missing a beat. But now, for several long seconds, he stared, unsmilingly, at his questioner, Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation, a public policy institution. Finally, he...

Categories Appeasement/Media Criticism/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks/WMD
April 9, 2008

Did North Korea proliferate to Iran, too?

An Israeli news site reports that North Korea aided Iran’s nuclear program with nuclear technology and material, according to the Israeli news site Haaretz (ht to a reader): According to information obtained by Washington and Jerusalem, North Korea transferred technology and nuclear materials to Iran to aid Tehran’s secret nuclear arms program. U.S. and Israeli officials agreed last week that the talks between the U.S. and North Korea, scheduled to take place in Singapore tomorrow, should be used to pressure...

Categories Proliferation/WMD
April 7, 2008

China Steps Up Efforts to Undermine U.S. and U.N. Sanctions Against N. Korea

The single most important provision of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1718, for which China cast a disingenuous “yes” vote, is the provision that requires member states to “ensure” that funds flowing into North Korea are not used for its WMD programs. Similarly, Resolution 1695 requires states to “exercise vigilance” against efforts to fund U.N. sanctions. Now, in the wake of U.S. Treasury sanctions that have put the North Korean regime under unprecedented pressure to meet its disarmament obligations, China is...

Categories China/China & Korea/Money Laundering/NK Crime/NK Economics/Proliferation/WMD
March 24, 2008

WaPo Columnist Reveals NK-Syria Nuclear Agreement

In yesterday’s Washington Post, David Ignatius wrote a column pining for  a “breakthrough” in Chris Hill’s failed Agreed Framework 2.0.  Ignatius defines that as getting our hands on 30-40 kilograms of North Korean plutonium, which happens to  coincide with  North Korea’s own  low-range estimate.  Hill has been eager to accept this lower figure in the interests of declaring victory, although some U.S. estimates have put the actual figure closer to 50 kilograms.  The discrepancy is enough for a couple of...

Categories Diplomacy/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks/WMD
September 17, 2007

The Orchard File: What are North Korea and Syria up to?

In the wake of the first reports about a reported Israeli air strike in  Syria, a  new crop  of reports  has considerably muddied facts that initially had seemed much clearer.  Journalistic politics is certainly a part of the problem.  Some of the reports are alarming, while others seek to downplay, and anyone who claims to be objective about war, diplomacy, and WMD today  is lying.  You probably know where I stand on Agreed Framework 2.0 by now.  If the more...

Categories Axis of Evil/Proliferation/WMD
July 21, 2007

The Next Deadlock

The irony of North Korea calling another nation “fascist” can’t be appreciated by those who are missing that gene, confined  within North Korea, or both.  Maybe this is an f-bomb that could only be built  in a place where abductees are no more hostages than their captors.  It’s probable that the author’s irony  was completely unintentional —  that he was  oblivious to  what Earthlings would think when they read his words: The search [of Chongryon headquarters] was part of an...

Categories Abductions/Six-Party Talks/WMD
July 16, 2007

IAEA Confirms Yongbyon Shutdown

After much speculation, the International Atomic Energy Agency has confirmed that North Korea has shut down its plutonium reactor at Yongbyon.  I have always expected North Korea to go through this part of the deal (full text here), as I expected them to let IAEA inspectors back into Yongbyon and the other  facilities near it.  But to simplify arguments I’ve made here  before, those things cost North Korea almost  nothing: It’s easy to kick inspectors out.  They’ve done it before....

Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/WMD
July 14, 2007

If Jack Pritchard Doesn’t Believe Jack Pritchard, Why Should We?

Jack Pritchard probably comes to his role as South Korea’s  main policy mouthpiece honestly,  through a shared  belief that the next ten years of unrequited aid really will change North Korea into a peaceful, bucolic, union-free garment  district.  Pritchard is President of the Korea Economic  Institute, which  works  Washington’s Korea-watching and policy-making crowds through its regular sponsorship of social and academic dinner  events.  I’ve been to a few myself, and though I seldom agree with  what I hear there,  the...

Categories Media Criticism/Six-Party Talks/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Politics/Washington Views/WMD
June 24, 2007

Vanishing Goalposts and a Fool’s Errand

The minute we have bilateral talks, the six-party talks will unwind. That’s exactly what Kim Jong Il wants. — George W. Bush seemed to understand the stupidity of holding both multilateral and bilateral talks with North Korea when John Kerry was proposing them back in 2004. To truly discredit that idea, however, Bush had to flip-flop and try it on himself. Now we know what the worst of both worlds looks like. First, we got together with the representatives of...

Categories Anju Links/Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/WMD
June 18, 2007

Lee Myung-Bak Proposes ‘Kaesong Archipelago’

Would you trust this man?  If you were one of those hoping that the next South  Korean election would be the end of our long international nightmare, you were mistaken: Former Seoul Mayor Lee Myung-bak, the front-running opposition presidential aspirant in December’s election, proposed Monday creating a “Manhattan-like” island near the border with North Korea and building an inter-Korean industrial park there to ease military tension. Dubbed “Na-deul,” which means a narrow waterway in Korean, the manmade island would be...

Categories Human Rights/NK Economics/Proliferation/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Politics/WMD