Category: Uncategorized

Obama says US won’t stop military drills, spurning North Korea

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On Sunday North Korea’s foreign minister Ri Su Yong had told the Associated Press his country was willing to halt its nuclear tests if the U.S. suspended its annual joint military exercises with South Korea. “If we continue on this path of confrontation, this will lead to very catastrophic results, not only for the two countries but for the whole entire world as well,” he said. “It is really crucial for the United States government to withdraw its hostile policy against the DPRK and as an expression of this stop the military exercises, war exercises, in the Korean Peninsula. Then we will respond likewise.”

President Barack Obama responded the U.S. won’t back down from strengthening its military alliances and defenses against North Korea until the country “shows seriousness” toward eliminating nuclear weapons from the Korean peninsula.

The U.S. and South Korea intensified their military exercises, which are expected to continue through the month. Approximately 300,000 South Korea troops and 17,000 U.S. troops are participating in the drills, according to the joint U.S. and South Korean military command.

[Bloomberg]

Tales from North Koreans working abroad

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After landing an enviable job outside North Korea as a waitress, Lee Soung Hee said she was given only one day off per month and had to work even when she learned her mother had died. She said secret police agents monitored waitresses and beat them for hiding tips.

“There were customers who were touching our bodies, but we must not refuse that because our mission was to curry favor with them as much as possible to make them spend all their money,” she said. “When customers poured drinks for us, we had to drink them all. But we could not get intoxicated or we would have been criticized for failing to be loyal to the party.”

She said colleagues who failed to earn target incomes had to go to motels to have sex with customers who would pay about 650 yuan ($100).

Lim, a novelist, was a carpenter for several months in Kuwait. He said he never received his promised $120-a-month salary, though he worked from dawn to midnight at a site surrounded by wire fences. He said he was frustrated when he learned Bangladesh and Indonesian workers nearby earned at least $450 per month. Lim said he was allowed to moonlight at other construction sites after promising North Korean officials a cut of the extra income.

Lee Yong-ho, a defector who was a truck driver at a Russian logging camp, said he often worked 12 to 14 hours per day but never thought about his working conditions. “Slaves? Well, I didn’t actually think about something like that. I only thought how much I could earn each month,” said Lee, now a manual laborer in South Korea.

Kim, who worked at a different Siberian logging camp with about 900 other North Koreans, said dozens of workers died during his stay, many after being hit by falling trees. He said dead workers were stored for months in some vacant houses, with their entire bodies except their heads wrapped by blankets. “It was so cold there that they hadn’t decomposed. Their faces looked just the same as before,” he said. “I once touched some of their faces and it was like touching ice.”

[ABC News]

Why analysts of North Korea aren’t laughing

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Bruce Klingner knows better than anyone how dangerous North Korea really is. He spent years analyzing the Hermit Kingdom for the CIA, and he now works as a Northeast Asia analyst at the Heritage Foundation.

And yet even he finds himself having an occasional chuckle at the North’s absurdity. The bombastic rhetoric and over-the-top propaganda is “kind of like 1950s Soviet Union on steroids,” he says.

But over the past few months, the experts have pretty much stopped laughing. That’s because North Korea has undertaken an unusual number of tests in the first quarter of 2016, everything from detonating a nuclear bomb underground to launching a satellite on a rocket that could be converted to a ballistic missile.

Keeping up with the pace of activity is “exhausting, to be honest,” says Melissa Hanham, a North Korea analyst at the East Asia Nonproliferation Program of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey California.

What’s clear, both analysts say, is that the North is working quickly towards its ultimate goal: a nuclear warhead small enough to fit on top of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). And they’re making pretty good progress.

A series of photos released by North Korea’s propaganda apparatus earlier this March is perhaps the best example of how views are changing. It shows the country’s current dictator, Kim Jong Un, the son of Kim Jong Il, posing in front a shiny silver ball placed atop chintzy red table cloth.

As experts started to analyze the pictures more closely, they weren’t laughing. The ball on the table was obviously a model, but many of the details were reasonably close to a real miniaturized warhead.

“They definitely know what a bomb looks like,” Hanham says. “I mean, that model didn’t come out of thin air. … It has roots in the truth.”

Adm. Bill Gortney, who heads the North American Aerospace Defense Command, told lawmakers: “It’s the prudent decision on my part to assume that [Kim Jong Un] has the capability to miniaturize a nuclear weapon and put it on an ICBM.” This is a change in tone from just a few years ago, when the U.S. intelligence community stated that North Korea didn’t have all the tools it needed to send a nuke over American soil.

Both Klingner and Hanham say there’s no need to panic. North Korea’s newest ballistic missile is untested, and they have yet to prove they have vital reentry technology that would allow their warhead to reach its target without burning up in the atmosphere. But Klingner also says it’s clear that North Korea is making lots of progress.

 [NPR]

North Korea nuclear threat not all bluff

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Skeptics of North Korea’s nuclear threat, and there are many, have long clung to two comforting thoughts. While the North has the bomb, it doesn’t have a warhead small enough to put on a long-range rocket. And it certainly doesn’t have a re-entry vehicle to keep that warhead from burning up in the atmosphere before it could reach a target like, as it has suggested before, Manhattan.

North Korea on Tuesday suggested it will soon show the world it has mastered both technologies. That would require a huge jump in the North’s suspected nuclear capabilities, so it may be just the latest case of Pyongyang propaganda. But if it delivers, it will put to rest one other comforting thought: that it’s safe for policymakers in Washington and elsewhere to take North Korea’s claims as mainly just bluster.

Kim Jong Un supposedly ordered the commencement of preparations for a “nuclear warhead explosion test” and test-firings of “several kinds of ballistic rockets able to carry nuclear warheads” to be conducted soon. As with all such reports, it’s hard to separate Pyongyang’s wishful thinking from the current reality.

Seoul, meanwhile, was holding to its skeptical line. Its Defense Ministry said Tuesday it remains unconvinced the North has achieved re-entry vehicle technology. Spokesman Moon Sang Gyun said the assessment is based on South Korean and U.S. intelligence. He refused to elaborate.

[Read full AP article]

US deploys additional ballistic missile defense asset in the Korean peninsula

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In response to North Korea’s 4th nuclear test and its firing of a long-range missile, the US additionally deployed ballistic missile defense assets in the Korean Peninsula.

Commander of the Eighth US Army Thomas Vandal said on February 13 that “North Korea’s ongoing development of a ballistic missile in defiance of the will of the international community requires an effective ballistic missile defense from the Korea-US alliance. The additional deployment of ballistic missile defense assets is part of our emergency deployment readiness posture.”

PAC-3 is a low-altitude defense intercept missile which can strike a North Korean short and middle-distance missile at a height of 30 to 40km. While this is not targeting the long-range missile that North Korea recently fired, it will be interpreted as a strong warning towards North Korea.

The PAC-3 unit to be deployed will be integrated into the Korea-US combined and joint ballistic missile defense system.

Korea and the US are carrying out the most advanced and largest combined training, being held from March 7 to April 30. There are going to be 5,750 troops and 1 Carrier Strike Group and 45 fighters, up significantly from the year before. And with the deployment of the US strategic asset into the Korean Peninsula, both countries will show North Korea their combined power.

[Defence Talk]

Russia and China attempt to rein in North Korea

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Russia and China have urged North Korea to halt ballistic-missile tests and return to talks on its nuclear program. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi issued the appeal following talks in Moscow on March 11.

The two met a day after North Korea defied the United Nations by firing two short-range ballistic missiles into the sea.

Just prior to the joint Russian-Chinese statement, North Korean official media said leader Kim Jong Un had watched a ballistic-missile test launch and ordered the country to improve its nuclear attack capability by conducting more tests.

[AP]

South Korea’s own sanctions against North Koreans

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South Korea said it will announce its own punitive steps against North Korea this week over its latest nuclear and missile tests, lending support to the latest United Nations Security Council (UNSC) sanctions.

The South Korean government is expected today to unveil a list of North Korean officials and institutions that will be barred from trading with South Korean companies and banks, sources say. South Korea will also freeze their assets here if there are any.

The North Korean figures and institutions subject to the South’s own sanctions are separate from the 16 individuals and 12 entities blacklisted by the U.N Security Council in the latest resolution.

South Korea will also ban the entry of ships from other nations if the vessels have visited North Korea, or if the vessels are suspected of originating from the repressive state but are flying other countries’ flags.

Meanwhile, speculation is growing that South Korea will scrap the so-called “Rajin-Hassan Project,” a logistics project involving North Korea and Russia. The project is aimed at importing Siberia-produced coal by transporting it by train between Russia’s border town of Rajin and North Korea’s port in Hassan and then loading the coal on to ships.

[The Korea Times]

US general says conflict with North Korea would be akin to World War II

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The commander of American forces in South Korea, Gen. Curtis Scaparrrotti, warned the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday that a conflict with North Korea could resemble the scale of World War II.

Describing what the confrontation might look like, Scaparrrotti said, “Given the size of the forces and the weaponry involved, this would be more akin to the Korean War and World War II — very complex, probably high casualty.”

The U.S. military suffered 405,399 fatalities in World War II and 36,574 during the Korean War of 1950-1953. Korean casualties were in the millions.

Scaparrotti also said that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un would use a weapon of mass destruction if he thought the fate of his rule was at stake. He said that tensions on the Korean Peninsula were at their highest level in more than 20 years.

The North Korean military warned the U.S. and South Korea Tuesday to expect retaliations for their annual joint military drill in March.

[CNN]

North Korea offered — then rebuffed — talks with US

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North Korea quietly reached out to U.S. officials through the United Nations in New York last fall to propose formal peace talks on ending the Korean War, a response to President Barack Obama’s comments that the U.S. was willing to engage Pyongyang as it has with other rogue regimes, senior U.S. officials told CNN.

That effort fell short, the officials said, with the North Koreans refusing to include their nuclear program in any negotiations as the U.S. required and soon after testing a nuclear weapon.

But it represented a new step from the Obama administration as it tried to lure the hermetic country out of its isolation and extend its track record of successful negotiations with nations long at odds with the United States, such as Iran and Cuba.

The U.S. told North Korea it was willing to discuss a formal peace to replace the 63-year-old armistice that ended hostilities after the Korean War, but only if efforts to curb Pyongyang’s nuclear program were part of the discussions.In doing so, the administration dropped a longstanding demand that North Korea take steps toward “denuclearization” before talks on a formal peace treaty began. Still, the North Koreans refused to allow the nuclear issue to be part of any talks.

[CNN]    

Chinese banks freeze North Korean accounts

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Chinese banks including a branch of China’s biggest bank Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) have frozen accounts belonging to North Koreans, a South Korean newspaper reported on Monday.

Citing phone conversations with an unnamed employee of ICBC’s office in the northeastern Chinese border city of Dandong, the Dong-A Ilbo reported that since late December it had suspended all deposits and transfers of foreign currencies in and out of accounts with North Korean names. “[The bank] had never told me why it was taking such measures, but it seems that they are related with the strained relations between North Korea and China,” the ICBC employee told the Dong-A Ilbo.

Washington and Seoul are seeking support from Beijing, Pyongyang’s main ally, for tougher sanctions against North Korea for its Feb. 7 rocket launch and January nuclear test.

After the rocket launch, another bank in northeast China, had also blocked transactions to North Koreans’ accounts, according to the Dong-A Ilbo report, which cited a Chinese businessman who has invested in North Korean mines.

Dandong is home to many ethnic Korean Chinese traders who deal with both North and South Korean businessmen. It is also home to South Korean and western Christian missionaries trying to operate in North Korea.

[Reuters]