http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6944560/

Pyongyang pulling out of 6-nation talks on atomic issue
The Associated Press
Updated: 2:57 a.m. ET Feb. 10, 2005

SEOUL, South Korea - North Korea publicly acknowledged Thursday for the first time that it has nuclear weapons and said it won’t return to six-nation talks aimed at getting it to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

The statement from the reclusive, Stalinist state dramatically raised the stakes in the two-year-old nuclear confrontation and posed a grave challenge to President Bush, who started his second term with a vow to end North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs through multilateral talks.

“We ... have manufactured nukes for self-defense to cope with the Bush administration’s ever more undisguised policy to isolate and stifle the (North),” the North Korean Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency.

North Korea had reportedly told American negotiators during private talks that it possessed nuclear weapons and might test one of them. North Korea’s U.N. envoy told The Associated Press last year the country had “weaponized” plutonium extracted from its pool of 8,000 nuclear spent fuel rods.

But Thursday’s statement marked North Korea’s first public admission that it has nuclear weapons through its usual means of making official declarations — statements carried on KCNA, its main news outlet to world.

'Only powerful strength can protect justice and truth'
North Korea’s “nuclear weapons will remain (a) nuclear deterrent for self-defense under any circumstances,” the ministry said. “The present reality proves that only powerful strength can protect justice and truth.”

Since 2003, the United States, the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia have held three rounds of talks in Beijing aimed at persuading the North to abandon nuclear weapons development in return for economic and diplomatic rewards. But no significant progress has been made.

A fourth round scheduled for September was canceled when North Korea refused to attend, citing what it called a “hostile” U.S. policy.

In the past weeks, hopes had risen that North Korea might return to six-nation talks, especially after Bush started his second term last month by refraining from direct criticism of North Korea.

Rejection of negotiations
On Thursday, North Korea said it had no intention to rejoin such talks any time soon.

“We have wanted the six-party talks but we are compelled to suspend our participation in the talks for an indefinite period till we have recognized that there is justification for us to attend the talks,” the North said Thursday.

North Korea said it came to its decision because “the U.S. disclosed its attempt to topple the political system in (North Korea) at any cost, threatening it with a nuclear stick.”

Still, North Korea said it retained its “principled stand to solve the issue through dialogue and negotiations and its ultimate goal to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula remain unchanged.”

Such a comment has widely been interpreted as North Korea’s negotiating tactic to get more economic and diplomatic concession from the United States before joining any crucial talks.

In Bush’s State of the Union address last week, he only mentioned North Korea in a single sentence, saying Washington was “working closely with governments in Asia to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions.” That was in stark contrast to Bush’s speech three years ago, when he branded North Korea part of an “axis of evil” with Iran and Iraq.

The softened rhetoric had raised hopes for a positive response from North Korea, with analysts saying that the North would wait to hear Bush’s speech before deciding to rejoin nuclear talks.

The nuclear crisis erupted in October 2002 when U.S. officials accused North Korea of running a secrete uranium-enrichment program in violation of international treaties, and it and its allies cut off free fuel oil shipments for the impoverished country.

North Korea retaliated by quitting the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in early 2003 and restarting its plutonium-based nuclear weapons program. Its plutonium facilities had been frozen in return for oil shipments and other benefits under a 1994 deal with Washington.

The North had also claimed that it completed reprocessing 8,000 spent fuel rods previously unloaded from its 5-megawatt reactor and kept under U.N. seals under the 1994 deal. The reprocessing could yield enough plutonium for several nuclear bombs.

The North has also reloaded the 5-megawatt reactor, which can generate more spent fuel laden with plutonium.

**********************
Bummer.
Now what George?

Well then.

At least I'm on the east coast?


...and the top two stories on CNN's American Morning are "The Pope is okay!" and "Charles is getting married!"

*turns on Sportscenter*

we're headed straight towards WW3

No way, isn't our official policy: North Who?

Yes, yes it is. Funny how the Cowboy at the top chooses his battles, isn't it? How anybody can say we're safer because we went into Iraq, while at the same time ignoring NK, is completely beyond me. Fuck the elections, fuck Saddam--Iraq was a mistake, plain and simple. And now that our military is bogged down there, there's not much we can do if a strike against NK becomes necessary.

Striking against North Korea has never been and will never be an option. It would cause a war on the Korean peninsula that would likely cost hundreds of thousands of deaths. North Korea is all military, like a million soldiers in their army.

The only way to fix North Korea is to open them up to the rest of the world. This is Nicholas Kristof's op-ed in the Times yesterday about how the Bush Administration has handled North Korea.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/09/opini ... istof.html

Bush Bites His Tongue
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: February 9, 2005


There are two words the Bush administration doesn't want you to think about: North Korea.

That's because the most dangerous failure of U.S. policy these days is in North Korea. President Bush has been startlingly passive as North Korea has begun churning out nuclear weapons like hot cakes.

The dangers were underscored with last week's reports that the uranium in Libya's former nuclear program may have come from North Korea. Indeed, Mr. Bush seems to recognize that his policy has failed - that's why he isn't talking much about North Korea now, at least publicly, and why (as reported in The Times today) he sent an emissary to talk last week with the Chinese leader, Hu Jintao, about how to tame North Korea.

North Korea is particularly awkward for Mr. Bush to discuss publicly because, as best we know, it didn't make a single nuclear weapon during Bill Clinton's eight years in office (although it did begin a separate, and secret, track to produce uranium weapons; it hasn't produced any yet but may eventually). In contrast, the administration now acknowledges that North Korea extracted enough plutonium in the last two years for about half a dozen nuclear weapons.

In fairness, Mr. Bush is paralyzed only because the alternatives are dreadful. A military strike on North Korea's nuclear sites might have been an option in the early 1990's, but today we don't know where the plutonium and the uranium are kept, so a military strike might accomplish little - but trigger a new Korean war. To fill the time, Mr. Bush has pursued six-party talks involving North Korea, but they have gotten nowhere.

So what would work?

The other option is the path that Richard Nixon pursued with Maoist China: resolute engagement, leading toward a new "grand bargain" in which Kim Jong Il would give up his nuclear program in exchange for political and economic ties with the international community. This has the advantage that the best bet to bring down Mr. Kim, the Dear Leader, isn't isolation, but contacts with the outside world.

A terrific new book on North Korea, "Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader" by Bradley Martin, underscores how those few glimpses that North Koreans have had of the outside world - by working in logging camps in Russia or sneaking trips to China - have helped undermine Mr. Kim's rule. Yet Westerners have in effect cooperated with him by helping to keep his borders sealed.

At least China and South Korea have a strategy to transform North Korea: encourage capitalism, markets and foreign investment. Chinese traders, cellphones and radios are already widespread in the border areas, and they are doing more to weaken the Dear Leader than anything Mr. Bush is doing.

North Korea is the eeriest and most totalitarian country I've ever visited, making even Saddam Hussein's Iraq seem normal by comparison. I realized how regimented the entire country was when I stopped two girls randomly on the street for an interview on a 1989 trip and the girls started praising their leaders - reciting identical lines in perfect unison.

In his new book, Mr. Martin tells the story of how one of the Dear Leader's assistants, while drunk, told his wife about his boss's womanizing. The wife, apparently a true believer in the North Korean system, was shocked and wrote a letter to the leadership to protest this immorality.

The Dear Leader had the woman brought to him, then denounced her before a crowd and ordered her shot. At that point, her husband begged to be allowed to kill her. Graciously acceding, Mr. Kim handed him a gun to kill his own wife.

So this is a regime that is not just menacing, but monstrous. Mr. Bush is right to regard it with loathing. But U.S. policy on North Korea for the last four years has only strengthened Mr. Kim and allowed him to expand his nuclear arsenal severalfold.

The risk is that Mr. Bush will respond to the failure of his first term's policy by adopting an even harder line in the coming months, seeking Security Council sanctions (he won't get them) and ultimately imposing some kind of naval quarantine. That would only strengthen Mr. Kim's grip on power, as well as risk a war on the Korean peninsula. A Pentagon study in the 1990's predicted that such a war could kill one million people.

In short, our mishandling of North Korea has been appalling - and it may soon get worse.


[prophetic, isn't it]

--PunkDavid

Heh, I just read that piece just before you posted it, and I agree with just about everything. However, military action must always remain an option to defend ourselves and our allies against a LEGITIMATE threat, unlike Saddam was. NK needs to get with the program and move into at least the 20th century for starters. But I worry that the time for diplomacy, not to mention its effectiveness with Il's regime, is long past. It's nice to think that cell phones and such will bring him down, but keep in mind the Kurds were very Westernized in Iraq and it didn't do shit.

It did for the Kurds, if not for the rest of Iraq.

And North Korea is firmly in the 20th century. The 1930's to be exact.

--PunkDavid

Right. That's what I'm saying. These border areas might be able to progress somewhat, but it's not going to do much to weaken the regime in power, which is the ultimate goal.

You know, North Korea is a different animal from Iraq. Iraq was dictatorial and oppressive and brutal and all of that. But they were never utterly shut off from the outside world the way North Korea is. Did you see that part in Kristof's story about the schoolgirls reciting praises for their leader in unison to him? That's fucking freakshow.

Shining ANY light into that cave would be a major revelation.

--PunkDavid

What's funny to me is being born in the mid 60s, which resulted in growing up with the idea that the USSR and the USA would eventually have a nuclear war (even if just on a limited basis), then having those fears removed by the dissolution of the USSR in the early 90s, and now seeing an even greater possiblity of nuclear conflict from a source (along with our own government) I never in a million years would have thought of as threatening.

I don't know, that's not much of a point to be making here, but it's all I can think of when I hear about North Korea and the administration's lack of ability to deal with them.

It really should be no surprise, since our current administration is still fighting the cold war. We've got Rumsfeld and Cheney, relics from the Ford administration (who BTW blocked disarmament negotiations in the 70's), and Cunnilingus Rice, the world renouned expert on the Soviet Union and Eatern Bloc, all of which is nice for a history professor, but pretty damned useless for a NSA or Sec. of State.

--PunkDavid

Someone remind me why the US gets to decide who does what worldwide.

because our bombs are bigger than their bombs?

They're threatening us. That's where I draw the line.

yes it would. take the pyongyang hotel for example; enormous cost to build (during which time people were starving all over the place), and now it sits empty. and dark (no windows). and tall (105 floors):

Jesus Christ. I had no idea about that. That is a crime agianst humanity, seriously.

--PunkDavid

Why are they threatening us though? Because they don't think it's cool that we think we get to run the whole goddamned world.

it's a pretty fascinating story actually. at least from what i know so far. one correction though - it's not the pyongyang hotel; it's the ryugyong hotel.

Eric, the USA has traditionally been one of the most rich and generous nations in the world. Were it not for the USA, (and yes I believe this) much of Europe would be either destroyed or Nazi run at the end of WWII.
The USA, up until recently, was thought of as a nation of hope and caring by other countries because we believe in the underlying principles of freedom and Democracy. So we were GIVEN this power by other nations to tell the rest of the world what to do, we have been looked to to be the world's policemen and peace keepers for many years. Unfortunately, in my opinion, we don't mean these same things to the world today, and the cliche - Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, keeps popping in my head. I don't think we DO have the right to tell the rest of the world what to do anymore, and I think that's our own fault (and our government's).