Category: North Korea

Like I said before, President Trump does not respond well to threats:

U.S. President Donald Trump’s remarks about the possibility of using force against North Korea appears intended to warn against possible provocations ahead of the year-end deadline the regime set for Washington to show flexibility in their deadlocked nuclear talks, analysts said Wednesday.

Trump made the threat of military action on Tuesday, just hours after the North reiterated that the deadline is approaching and warned that it is entirely up to Washington what “Christmas gift” it wants to get.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has set the deadline for Washington to come up with an acceptable proposal to move forward the nuclear negotiations, warning that Pyongyang could otherwise take a “new way.”

“Now we have the most powerful military we’ve ever had and we’re by far the most powerful country in the world,” Trump told reporters during his trip to London to attend a meeting of North Atlantic Treaty Organization leaders.

“And, hopefully, we don’t have to use it, but if we do, we’ll use it. If we have to, we’ll do it,” he added.

Yonhap

You can read more at he link, but is everyone ready for an interesting 2020?

I am not sure threatening President Trump is a good course of action for the North Koreans. He doesn’t seem to respond well to threats:

North Korea said Tuesday that a year-end deadline is drawing near for the United States to come up with a new proposal in their nuclear negotiations, warning it is entirely up to Washington what “Christmas gift” it wants to get.

North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Ri Thae-song issued the warning, saying Pyongyang has tried hard “not to backtrack from the important steps it has taken,” referring to a moratorium on nuclear and long-range missile tests and other measures it has taken to demonstrate its commitment to denuclearization. 

The warning apparently means that unless the U.S. comes up with a new negotiating proposal acceptable to Pyongyang, the communist regime could restart testing of nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

It will be interesting to see how this turns out, will the U.S. government give him a slap on the hand or send him to prison?:

Virgil Griffith, who has lately been working at the Ethereum Foundation, has been arrested for allegedly going to a conference in North Korea and sharing his expertise in using cryptocurrency.

The United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced Friday that Griffith was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport on Thanksgiving Day.

“Despite receiving warnings not to go, Griffith allegedly traveled to one of the United States’ foremost adversaries, North Korea, where he taught his audience how to use blockchain technology to evade sanctions,” John Demers, an assistant attorney general for national security, said in a statement.

Yahoo

You can read more at the link.

Testing an ICBM I think will only happen after Kim Jong-un’s January 1st deadline to have a deal in place to drop sanctions. It makes no sense for him to do the test before then. Plus I only think he goes through with an ICBM test if he is confident that the Trump administration will not respond militarily:

Frequent movements of trucks have been recently detected at a rocket launch site in North Korea, a sign that Pyongyang may be preparing another long-range missile test. 

“North Korea appeared to have renovated its missile-related facilities in Dongchang-ri [in Cholsan County of North Pyongan Province] earlier in the year,” a high-ranking official in the South Korean government told the JoongAng Ilbo on Friday. “And recently, we detected an increase in the movement of vehicles in the area.”

At least four vehicles including buses and trucks were spotted in a parking lot near a facility that tests engine combustion in a satellite image of the site on Nov. 1 provided by Google Earth.

“There is a facility used for testing engine combustion in the area, and we detected small buses and trucks coming and going there,” the official said. “The North may not be ready to test a missile immediately, but we see these as signs that it is getting ready for one.”

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

This is all part of North Korea’s pressure campaign leading up to their January 1st deadline to have sanctions dropped:

North Korea said Friday it has successfully conducted the final test of a new super-large multiple rocket launcher with the firing of two projectiles that landed in the East Sea the previous afternoon. 

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un inspected the test-fire of a super-large multiple rocket launcher, conducted by the Academy of National Defense Science, the North’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported Friday. “The volley test-fire aimed to finally examine the combat application of the super-large multiple launch rocket system [MLRS] proved the military and technical superiority of the weapon system and its firm reliability,” KCNA said. “The Supreme Leader expressed great satisfaction over the results of the test-fire.” 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

Another play straight out of the North Korean provocation playbook:

South Korea’s military on Thursday confirmed it had completed an operation to evict a North Korean merchant ship from its waters some 17 hours after the vessel crossed to the southern side of the Northern Limit Line (NLL) the previous day. 

However, it took South Korean military authorities nearly six hours to realize the vessel was a North Korean merchant ship sailing on the southern side of the NLL, the de facto maritime border between the two Koreas in the Yellow Sea.  

The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said Wednesday that the 500-ton merchant ship crossed the NLL, northwest of Baengnyeong Island, at around 6:40 a.m. Wednesday. 

At one point, the South Korean Navy fired warning shots after the vessel did not respond to multiple warnings it had issued to immediately leave the NLL, in accordance with protocol.

On Thursday, the JCS confirmed that the South Korean Navy guided the merchant ship out of South Korean waters and completed the operation around 11:30 p.m. that night. 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

Another typical North Korean playbook play here with conducting a test firing that corresponds with a U.S. holiday:

North Korea fired two projectiles from what is presumed to be a super-large multiple rocket launcher on Thursday, South Korea’s military said, in the latest in a series of military moves amid stalled denuclearization talks with the United States.

The projectiles were fired from Yeonpo in the country’s eastern South Hamgyong Province into the waters off the east coast at around 4:59 p.m., the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said in a release. 

Both flew around 380 km, reaching a maximum altitude of around 97 km, and were fired within a 30-second interval, the JCS added.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but this is all just more of the pressure campaign that the Kim regime is putting on the Trump administration to get them to give in to their demands to drop sanctions.