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Category: Proliferation

December 8, 2007

North Korea hasn’t lost its talent for making enemies

[Update: This seems as good a place as any to tack on two more sets of comments from Chris Hill; plus, the Administration’s loyal soldier  Victor Cha weighs in at the Chosun Ilbo.  Scroll down.]   Let’s face it: American conservatives are more interested in and concerned by events in the Middle East than they are in North Korea, and a bad deal with North Korea might not have been enough to mobilize their opposition if it only affected Korea....
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Proliferation
December 4, 2007

KCNA Announces Hill’s Arrival

Pyongyang, December 3 (KCNA) — Christopher Hill, assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of State, and his party arrived here today.  [link] That’s the entire story, not an excerpt.  Why so terse?  Maybe their friends in Seoul sent them this (ht: GI Korea): The U.S. government decided to impose three new conditions for removing North Korea from Washington`s list of state sponsors of terrorism, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported on Saturday. The new conditions are in addition to the current U.S...
Categories Diplomacy/Proliferation/U.S. Politics
December 1, 2007

Hill the Hawk? Not This Year.

A friend was kind enough to pass along five transcripts of Christopher Hill’s remarks to the press during his current trip to Japan and the Koreas. There’s too much interesting information in there to graf and the remarks aren’t long, so I’m just going to upload them in full and let you read for yourself. These are State’s own transcripts; I’ve appended the  text to the bottom of this post. The key point is that North Korea is going to...
Categories Diplomacy/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks
November 27, 2007

Jane’s: Chemical Explosion in Syria Killed Iranians, N. Korean Engineers

When Israel bombed a mysterious site in Syria last September, the newspapers reported a dizzying number of theories about what was attacked and where.  Before summarizing those theories in this post, I warned you that they weren’t necessarily  mutually exclusive, and here’s another piece of evidence to throw into the hopper.  Jane’s Defense Weekly, a highly respected publication to be sure, claims that last July, the Syrians were loading chemical warheads onto their North Korean-made SCUD-C missiles for a test. ...
Categories Proliferation
November 26, 2007

Impervious to Evidence: State’s Appeasement Express Arrives at the Koryo Hotel

[Update:   Richardson links to State’s quasi-denial:  why, yes, we have stationed a State Department  employee in Pyongyang, but he’s strictly there to supervise the equipment for the technical process of disabling North Korea’s nuclear programs.  That’s peculiar.  If this employee’s job is strictly scientific or technical, why not avoid giving people the wrong idea and  send someone from the Department of Energy or Defense  instead?  At best, this is a trial balloon.   More likely, we’ve just seen  the camel’s...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Proliferation
November 24, 2007

Bush Administration’s Blackout Can’t Silence Syria-N. Korea Speculation

The latest theory, via  Prof. Uzi Even, an  Israeli scientist interviewed in Haaretz, is this: “In my estimation this was something very nasty and vicious, and even more dangerous than a reactor,” says Even. “I have no information, only an assessment, but I suspect that it was a plant for processing plutonium, namely a factory for assembling the bomb.” In other words, Syria already had several kilograms of plutonium, and it was involved in building a bomb factory (the assembling...
Categories Diplomacy/Proliferation
September 22, 2007

Sunday Times: Israelis Seized N. Korean ‘Nuclear Material’ in Syria

I wonder how Chris Hill is going to talk his way out of this one: Israeli commandos seized nuclear material of North Korean origin during a daring raid on a secret military site in Syria before Israel bombed it this month, according to informed sources in Washington and Jerusalem. The attack was launched with American approval on September 6 after Washington was shown evidence the material was nuclear related, the well-placed sources say. They confirmed that samples taken from Syria...
Categories Axis of Evil/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks
September 20, 2007

We must be smoking what they’re growing

North Korea was dropped from the U.S. list of countries producing illicit drugs, a sign of further relief of tensions between the two countries. “North Korea is not affecting the United States as much as the requirements on the list,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Christy McCampbell said on Sept. 17 in Washington, according to a transcript of her speech on the State Department Web site.  [Bloomberg] And that decision is based on what?  On  absolutely nothing but the interests...
Categories Appeasement/Axis of Evil/Drugs & N Korea/Six-Party Talks
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
September 13, 2007

Is North Korea Selling Nukes to Syria?

Update:   North Korea may be cooperating with Syria on some sort of nuclear facility in Syria, according to new intelligence the United States has gathered over the past six months, sources said. The evidence, said to come primarily from Israel, includes dramatic satellite imagery that led some U.S. officials to believe that the facility could be used to produce material for nuclear weapons. The new information, particularly images received in the past 30 days, has been restricted to a...
Categories Proliferation/Six-Party Talks
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
June 16, 2007

Dude, Where’s My Spine? Agreed Framework 2.0 at Four Months

Yesterday, the press reported that after months of multilateral bungling,  we had  finally transferred either 20 or 25 million dollars of frozen assets to the disposal of Kim Jong Il for whatever purposes he chooses.  Those assets had  gathered in a shady Macau Bank known as Banco Delta Asia until September 2005, when the Treasury Department  published an  interim rule noting  that they were, in large part,  laundered proceeds of counterfeiting and drug dealing.  Does anyone think  Kim’s purposes  will...
Categories Appeasement/Six-Party Talks/WMD
April 26, 2007

Anju Links for 26 April: Who’s Afraid of Victor Cha, and the Sexual Psychology of Military Parades

*   It has now been 13 days since April 13th, the day North Korea was supposed to have shut down the Yongbyon reactor, begun discussions on the full extent of its nuclear weapons and programs, invited in U.N. inspectors, and rejoined six-party talks (to include actually talking).  North Korea has (surprise!) broken every one of those agreements.  Victor Cha has since reportedly warned them that our patience is limited.  So in Pyongyang they ask …. *   Or Else,...
Categories Abductions/America/Japan & Korea/Refugees/Six-Party Talks/Southeast Asia/Terrorism (NK)/Terrorism/Iraq/WMD