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Category: WMD

February 11, 2013

Guess who just tested a nuke. Now I’m going to sleep.

Here’s the USGS report, coming in at 4.9,  and here’s the first report saying it looks like a nuke test.  In case you’re keeping track, North Korea’s 2009 test measured 4.7 on the Richter scale after a yield estimated between 2 and 8 kilotons. Its 2006 test registered 4.2, at a yield of just under a kiloton.  Remember — this is a logarithmic scale, which means that a 5 is ten times larger than a 4. Anyway, a nuclear test site isn’t the only...
Categories Proliferation/WMD
February 7, 2013

Open Sources: Special Nukewatch Edition

ANYONE UP FOR A NUKE POOL? So North Korea didn’t test a nuke on Monday, as rumor had it, but Sung Yoon Lee was on the record (in an email to me) before that, saying it would happen around February 10th. If it’s a uranium device, the closest guess gets my autograph on your copy of “Meltdown.”  I say this knowing that there might be two winners, and that it might be a while before we know, if we ever do. For more on...
Categories Proliferation/WMD
February 6, 2013

Sometimes, a missile is just a missile

Every time North Korea tests a rocket, Hans Blix sheds a little tear and Ban Ki Moon’s fluffy white tail stops wagging, because North Korean rocket tests violate three U.N. Security Council Resolutions — 1695 (which bans “all activities related to its ballistic missile programme”), UNSCR 1718 (ditto, and requires N. Korea to “re-establish its pre-existing commitments to a moratorium on missile launching”), and 1874 (which bans “any launch using ballistic missile technology”).  North Korea’s official response is that it is...
Categories Anju Links/Anti-Americanism/Propaganda/WMD/WTF?
January 9, 2013

Over at Foreign Policy …

… Professor Sung Yoon Lee and I have a piece up discussing the world’s next, almost-certain-to-be-lost opportunity to respond to North Korea more effectively than having Susan Rice continue to beat her cranium against the Great Wall of China at the Security Council.  It’s a blend of Professor Lee’s prognostications about what the North will do next, and some of the financial constriction ideas I’ve been pushing as one of those Three C’s. I’ll say this about FP — it’s...
Categories Counterfeiting/Missiles/Money Laundering/North-South/Proliferation/Sanctions/WMD
May 25, 2012

Nuke Test Watch: One Disease, Many Symptoms

OK, I admit it — I’m disappointed in the North Koreans for wimping out: North Korea on Tuesday ruled out an imminent nuclear weapon test, but vowed to expand and bolster its nuclear deterrence as well as its sovereign right to launch satellites, while slamming the Group of Eight nations’ condemnation of its failed long-range rocket launch in April. In a remark given to Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency, a spokesman for North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said that the North...
Categories Appeasement/China & Korea/Diplomacy/Missiles/Proliferation/WMD
April 11, 2012

A New Approach to North Korea: Contain, Constrict & Collapse

Sometime in the next few hours, North Korea will launch a prototype for an intercontinental ballistic missile, in flagrant violation of three U.N. Security Council resolutions. The North Koreans announced the launch two weeks after agreeing to a deal to freeze their missile and nuclear programs in exchange for U.S. food aid. It now seems they will follow their missile test with a nuclear test. Traditionally, Chinese obstructionism delays U.N. Security Council action by about three weeks after a North...
Categories Diplomacy/Missiles/Proliferation/Sanctions/Subversion/WMD
January 30, 2012

North Korea shipped chemical reagents to Syria, possibly via China

This is a little old now, but I haven’t seen anyone else talking about it, so I will. The U.N. has launched an investigation into an attempted shipment of chemical weapons reagents and protective suits to Syria, a close ally of Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah, and whose government gave safe passage to recruits on their way to Iraq to join Al Qaeda forces there. In November 2009, Greek authorities seized a container from a Liberia-registered freighter as it headed toward...
Categories Axis of Evil/China/Proliferation/Taiwan/WMD
September 25, 2011

Al-Kibar Redux

There’s nothing more I really care to say about what we should have done about the North Korean-built nuclear reactor at Al-Kibar in Syria, which Israel destroyed in a September 2009 air strike. This was a matter of some temporary inconvenience to Chris Hill’s efforts (abetted by the President and Secretary of State) to sell us a shiny, pre-owned agreed framework, complete with rust-proofing and warranty. Recently, however, Dick Cheney’s memoir has revived that debate. Michael Anton, writing in The...
Categories Axis of Evil/Diplomacy/Missiles/Proliferation/U.S. Politics/WMD
June 11, 2011

IAEA report concludes that North Korea aided Syria in nuclear proliferation

Recently, a friend provided me a bootleg copy (thanks) of an International Atomic Energy Agency report implicating North Korea and its Syrian client in violating IAEA safeguards by developing a clandestine nuclear weapons capability. The IAEA doesn’t appear to have released the report publicly; it appears to have been leaked. With that said, it’s really nothing we haven’t known since the spring of 2008, when congressional pressure finally forced Chris Hill to lift his embargo on all information related to...
Categories "United" Nations/Axis of Evil/Proliferation/WMD
May 16, 2011

U.N. Report Implicates China in N. Korea-Iran Missile Transfers; China Tries to Block Said Report

If Iran, Iraq, and North Korea are an Axis of Evil, then China must be the Limited-Slip Differential of the Axis of Evil: North Korea and Iran appear to have been regularly exchanging ballistic missile technology in violation of U.N. sanctions, according to a confidential U.N. report obtained by Reuters on Saturday. The report said the illicit technology transfers had “trans-shipment through a neighboring third country.” That country was China, several diplomats told Reuters on condition of anonymity. [Reuters] China...
Categories "United" Nations/Axis of Evil/China/Missiles/Proliferation/WMD
April 29, 2011

North Koreans Hard at Work on New Uranium Reactor

Images published yesterday by ISIS show fresh construction adjacent to North Korea’s old 5-megawatt reactor, the one that eventually became the exclusive focus of two failed agreed frameworks. For comparison, here’s an image of the same reactor from February 17, 2007, coincidentally just days after the second agreed framework was signed. The cooling tower in the image was blown up in ceremonial spectacle for the media, and some of the equipment inside the main reactor building (on the right) was...
Categories Anju Links/Proliferation/WMD
December 21, 2010

Must Read: Gordon Flake on Uranium and Agreed Framework 3.0

In the endless loop of our nuclear diplomacy with North Korea, new facts, novel arguments, and original thoughts are scarce things for which we scour a hundred news stories and blog posts. Here, in this excellent two–part interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Evan Ramstad, Gordon Flake of the Mansfield Institute explains why North Korea’s coming-out with an advanced uranium enrichment capability means that an enduring nuclear disarmament agreement is now next to impossible. With the public display of, and...
Categories Proliferation/WMD
November 28, 2010

Funny how that works: China doesn’t want to restrain North Korea from attacking South Korea, but hates it when the U.S. Navy shows up on its front door. The Wall Street Journal passes along a sampling of Chinese reactions to the shelling of Yeonpyeong. Well-connected people I’ve spoken to seem convinced that there’s a segment within Chinese academia and government that really has had it with North Korea, but I doubt China will ever restrain North Korea without being subjected...
Categories Anju Links/WMD/Yeonpyeong Attack
November 27, 2010

“Some people imagine there is a building somewhere with a secret door they can open and find a group of scantily clad women enriching uranium.”

This delectable quote, attributed to Christopher “Kim Jong” Hill, is passed along by U.S. Representative and blogger Ed Royce. It seems that every North Korea wonk in Washington is laughing at Hill’s quote this week. Admittedly, I’ve certainly imagined everything Hill described, but not all at the same time. Alas, only my imaginings about the building, the door, and the uranium ever came completely true. As for the remainder, the prospects seem rather bleak. At Hill’s urging, North Korea was...
Categories WMD
November 25, 2010

Mike Chinoy Responds

You know, if I’d realized that Mike Chinoy, former CNN correspondent and author of “Meltdown,” was reading all those things I was writing about him, I might not have been so mean. Why was I not informed? Dear Joshua, I am a regular reader of OneFreeKorea, which I have always found interesting and thought-provoking, despite the darts you regularly send my way. I have not responded to your frequent criticisms, but under the current circumstances, and given your derogatory comments...
Categories WMD
November 22, 2010

What? North Korea had a secret uranium enrichment program all along? Why was Mike Chinoy not informed?

Siegfried Hecker seems significantly more astonished than I am that North Korea has 2,000 centrifuges spinning out enriched uranium. [W]hatever the reason for the revelation, which a seasoned American nuclear scientist called “stunning,” it provides a new set of worries for the Obama administration, which is sending its special envoy on North Korea for talks with officials in South Korea, Japan and China this week. The scientist, Siegfried Hecker, said in a report posted Saturday that he was taken during...
Categories WMD