North Korea’s top leader Kim Jong-un is seen holding a cigarette in this photo capture from the North’s Korean Central TV on Dec. 13, 2017, as he attended the 8th Conference of Munitions Industry in Pyongyang a day earlier. North Korea launched a nationwide anti-smoking campaign last year, but outside watchers say the smoking rate is actually increasing, partly due to Kim’s smoking habit being frequently shown in public. (Yonhap)
The New York Times has a very good article published that shows who are the various scientists in North Korea that have made Kim Jong-un’s nuclear and ballistic missile ambitions so successful:
From left to right, Jang Cha-ha (scientist), Jon Il-ho (scientist), Kim Rak-gyom (commander of rocket forces), Yu Jin (munitions industry official).
“We have never heard of him killing scientists,” said Choi Hyun-kyoo, a senior researcher in South Korea who runs NK Tech, a database of North Korean scientific publications. “He is someone who understands that trial and error are part of doing science.”
Analysts are still trying to explain how North Korea managed to overcome decades of international sanctions and make so much progress so quickly. But it is clear the nation has accumulated a significant scientific foundation despite its backward image.
Its new ICBM is a feat of physics and engineering that has stunned the world, and each of its six nuclear tests has been more powerful than the last, boosting Mr. Kim’s stature at home and his leverage abroad. [New York Times]
Also if you are wondering how the North Koreans have been so successful so quick with their nuclear and missile programs, this may explain it:
North Korea has also recruited scientists from the former Soviet Union, offering salaries as high as $10,000 per month, according to Lee Yun-keol, a defector who runs the North Korea Strategic Information Service Center in Seoul and has studied the history of the North’s nuclear program.
In 1992, a plane carrying 64 rocket scientists from Moscow was stopped before departing for North Korea. It is not clear how many, if any, former Soviet scientists made it to North Korea in the decades since.
Theodore A. Postol, a professor emeritus of science, technology and international security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the North has “this fantastic record for flying rockets the first time and having them succeed.”
“We think it’s because they had rocket motors and designs that were basically Russian designs, and they had the expertise of Russian engineers who knew how to solve the problems,” he said.
A high-quality fake $100 note recently discovered in South Korea has stoked concerns of North Korean counterfeiting, Agence France Presse reported Tuesday.
Forgery experts at KEB Hana Bank said the $100 note, which was found at a Seoul branch in November, was almost identical to real notes.
“It was the first of a new kind of supernote ever found in the world,” Yi Ho-Joong, head of KEB Hana Bank’s anti-counterfeit centre told AFP.
North Korea made near perfect $100 bills — dubbed “supernotes” by US officials — for decades as part of a highly sophisticated counterfeiting program. The US believes that, at times, North Korea had earned up to $25 million per year from counterfeit notes.
“You need facilities worth some $100 million to produce counterfeit bills of this quality and no crime rings would invest that much to make fake dollars,” Yi added.
While no evidence directly links the note to North Korea, AFP reported there are suspicions North Korea has resumed its forgeries.
“There would have always been sufficient disrespect for the US financial system there to create counterfeits, which is the main reason why South Korean banks are suspecting the origin of the notes to be North Korea,” Roald Maliangkay, director of the Korea Institute at Australian National University, told Business Insider. [Business Insider]
You can read more at the link, but last year a North Korean agent was arrested in China trying to pass off $5 million in counterfeit US currency. It appears that the North Koreans have expanded their operations of passing off counterfeit currency into South Korea.
The male North Korean soldier that defected last month across the DMZ is actually a very small minority of the demographic that composes North Korean defectors. The vast majority of the defectors are actually women:
North Korean women dressed in traditional dresses, leave the restaurant they work at and head to the North Korean embassy in Beijing, on December 17, 2006. Women participate in North Korea’s unofficial economy in at higher rates and the country’s gray markets have continued to proliferate. UPI Photo/Stephen Shaver
The backward North Korean economy produces very little that the world wants. But Big Brother China, however, is hungry for the two things Pyongyang does have in relative abundance: coal and women. The coal keeps the fires burning in energy-poor China. The women help to meet the shortage of brides in China’s male-dominated society.
China’s one-child policy has devastated the female population. Over the past three-and-a-half decades that the policy has been in place, tens of millions of girls have disappeared from the population. They were killed in utero by sex-selection abortions, at birth by female infanticide, or after birth by simple neglect. (……)
One place that Chinese men look for brides is the other side of the Yalu River, for in North Korea there are lots of hungry young women longing for a better life. The population of Kim Jong Un’s socialist paradise subsists in near famine conditions, with two in five North Koreans undernourished and more than two-thirds on food aid. [Fox News]
You can read more at the link, but the 85% number discussed in the article has actually increased from the 80% number in 2015.
Besides the sex industry in China, the other factor that plays into this is that most of the men in North Korea are also tied up working in state owned factories or the military. This leaves the women to often be the ones working in the various markets that have sprang up around North Korea. The women working in the markets develop contacts with businessmen bringing goods in from China. This makes the women thus more susceptible to seeking to cross the border themselves.
Of further interest is that many of the North Korean refugees when they do come to South Korea end up becoming part of the sex industry in that country as well.
Could an Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile test be the next North Korean provocation? I guess we will find out:
This undated picture released from North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on August 25, 2016 shows a test-fire of strategic submarine-launched ballistic missile being launched at an undisclosed location. KNS/AFP/Getty
The Pentagon says the U.S. is “well postured” to deal with a possible submarine-launched ballistic missile from North Korea.
The Japanese daily Tokyo Shimbun reported last week that North Korea has completed development of five prototypes for an upgraded SLBM and will likely test it soon.
Pentagon spokesman Robert Manning wouldn’t comment on any matters of specific intelligence regarding North Korea on Monday – but said within the deep arsenal of U.S. capabilities, Washington is well postured to deal with it. [KBS Global]
It appears that the Kim regime is ready to nuke Mt. Mantap again:
North Korea appears to be preparing for another nuclear test despite probable aftershocks from its sixth and largest nuclear test, Sept. 3, still occurring, according to American experts on Pyongyang.
In a joint analysis released Monday, Frank Pabian, Joseph Bermudez Jr. and Jack Liu, citing satellite imagery, said there has been a “consistently high level of activity” at North Korea’s main nuclear test site in Punggye-ri.
The analysis was released by 38 North, a U.S. website specializing in North Korea-related issues.
The analysts claimed the suspected activity was detected at the West Portal, leading to an unused tunnel complex, but not the North Portal, where five of the six tests took place.
“Despite the continuation of small tremors near Mt. Mantap since North Korea’s last nuclear test, tunnel work at the Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site is still underway,” they said. “These efforts continue to be concentrated at the West Portal, leaving the North Portal…mostly dormant and likely abandoned, at least for the time being. At the West Portal, there has been a consistently high level of activity since North Korea’s last nuclear test.”
The activity included the routine presence of vehicles and personnel around the portal, movement of mining carts to an adjacent spoils pile and signs of fresh spoils being dumped there. [Korea Times]
The unofficial US ambassador to North Korea, Dennis Rodman now is advocating for a basketball game to be played between North Korea and the US territory of Guam:
Dennis Rodman plans to organize a basketball game between North Korea and the U.S. territory of Guam, the retired basketball star said Monday, as he seeks to personally mitigate a dangerous war of words between Washington and the isolated, nuclear-armed state.
“We thought, ‘This would be awesome!’” Rodman said in an interview in Beijing, his third stop on a “humanitarian tour” of Asia to promote peace between the U.S. and North Korea. “The people in Guam are all about it. They love it. You get a team from North Korea, get these guys from Pyongyang. Play it in Beijing.”
Guam’s national basketball team’s head coach, E.J. Calvo, said in an email that “this possible game would be a great opportunity.”
“We hope to inspire our young players and with something like this, the positive impact could be much greater,” he wrote. [LA Times]
You can read more at the link, but like I have said about efforts to get North Korea to participate in the Olympics, why is sports diplomacy being used with North Korea, but not when Apartheid South Africa existed? During its existence Apartheid South Africa was shunned from most international sporting competitions. The Kim regime has a far worse human rights record than Apartheid South Africa ever had and are arguably the greatest threat to world peace today and yet people are begging the North Koreans to participate in international sporting events.
Just like Apartheid South Africa, the Kim regime should be shunned from international sporting events not championed to participate in them.
RFA notes KCNA accidentally aired footage of a NK soldier being burned to death by Hwasong-15's exhaust flames during Nov 30th launch. The footage was edited out for subsequent broadcasts but NK residents in Yangkang province insist they saw him in flames.https://t.co/cX2GVeCLMd
