Category: North Korea

Here is the latest opinion on what the US should do about North Korea:

Washington should consider preemptively striking North Korean intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), said U.S. Senator Bob Corker, a Republican from Tennessee and chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, during the committee’s first hearing this year on North Korea on Tuesday.

The comment comes amid rising tension in South Korea and the United States after North Korean leader Kim Jong-un declared during his New Year’s address on Jan. 1 that his country was in its “final stage” of test-firing an ICBM, which would be the first of such tests if Kim actually follows through.

Seoul has yet to acknowledge detecting any signs that the North was preparing a test-fire, although several military sources here claim to have discovered two new missiles along North Korea’s eastern coast that could be an ICBM under work.   [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link.

How North Korea depicts the political upheaval in the South | The Economist https://t.co/ieam3alSpG

— Sokeel Park (@Sokeel) February 3, 2017

Whatever abuse of power he was involved in must not have been that bad considering he wasn’t executed:

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has sacked the chief of the country’s spy agency on suspected abuse of power after the ruling party conducted surveillance on the ministry, sources said Friday.

Kim Won-hong, 72, was dismissed from the head of the Ministry of State Security after the party’s audit late last year found his agency had abused its authority, according to the sources familiar with North Korean affairs.

His military rank may have been demoted to lieutenant general from full general, they said.

North Korea’s security ministry has powerful authority as it screens so-called reactionary elements in society, supervises political prisoners’ camps and arrests those who attempt to flee the country.

Known as one of heavyweights in North Korea, Kim became the head of the spy agency in April 2012 after Kim Jong-un took office in late 2011.

He is also known to have spearheaded the move to execute Jang Song-thaek in December 2013, the once-powerful uncle of the North’s young leader.

A local report said that Kim might have been dismissed for abusing his position and on corruption charges, adding there is a slim chance for him to be reinstated.  [Yonhap]

There have been many North Korea experts arguing that President Trump should pursue a deal with North Korea to freeze their nuclear and ICBM programs.  One US expert has now called any freeze deal with North Korea a “mirage”:

Most proponents are more careful than Mr. Clapper and refer to a “freeze” rather than a “cap.” A cap suggests U.S. acceptance of North Korea as a nuclear weapons state for the indefinite future. Doing that would destroy U.S. credibility not only with its allies in Seoul and Tokyo but throughout the world as well. It would also undermine the global nuclear nonproliferation regime and signal to Iran that it could violate its own nuclear agreement with impunity.

Most cap proponents understand this and so talk publicly instead about a freeze, arguing that it would just be a steppingstone on the way to elimination. This is disingenuous because they themselves don’t believe Pyongyang will ever give up the nuclear weapons it already has or even fully stop its nuclear development activities under a freeze.

In truth, a freeze now would just be a cap in disguise. The entire international community would also regard it as such, unlike in earlier years when the North’s nuclear capabilities were not as advanced and their elimination was still considered possible.

A negotiated freeze is like a mirage, an illusion that recedes as quickly as one tries to approach it. That applies both to what we would need Pyongyang to do and what Pyongyang would demand of us in return for a freeze.  [The Hill]

You can read more at the link, but the way I look at it is that any freeze deal should not include a peace treaty and only scaling down of US-ROK military exercises plus some lifting of sanctions.  A peace treaty should only be offered in return for the complete dismantlement of their nuclear and ICBM programs which we know they will never do.

The freeze deal should then have strong language in it that any non-compliance by North Korea opens them to a bombing strike to ensure compliance.  Including bombing strike wording then gives the US world opinion on its side if it needs to use force and makes it in the Chinese regime’s interest to ensure their benefactors in Pyongyang comply with the deal.

I and others have been saying this for years that the Kim regime would never denuclearize and its seems it is becoming a more popular viewpoint:

The United States should give up on any last-remaining hope that engagement with North Korea could lead to its denuclearization, a U.S. expert told a Senate hearing Tuesday, calling for all-round pressure on Pyongyang to rethink its nuclear pursuit.

Nicholas Eberstadt, a senior analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, made the remark during the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, as some experts have stepped up calls for reopening negotiations with Pyongyang to curb its dangerously accelerating nuclear and missile programs.

“At this juncture, as so often in the past, serious people around the world are calling to ‘bring North Korea back to the table’ to try to settle the DPRK nuclear issue. However, seeing the DPRK for what it is, rather than what we would like it to be, should oblige us to recognize two highly unpleasant truths,” Eberstadt said.

“First, the real existing North Korean leadership will never willingly give up their nuclear option. Never. Acquiescing in denuclearization would be tantamount to abandoning the sacred mission of Korean unification: which is to say, disavowing the DPRK’s raison d’etre,” he said.

Therefore, submitting to foreign demands to give up its nuclear weapons could well mean more than humiliation and disgrace for North Korean leadership, and would mean delegitimization and destabilization for the regime as well, the expert said.

“Second, international entreaties —- summitry, conferencing, bargaining, and all the rest —- can never succeed in convincing the DPRK to relinquish its nuclear program. Sovereign governments simply do not trade away their vital national interests,” he said.  [Yonhap]

You can read much more at the link.

U.S. entry of N. Korean refugees put on hold by Trump's executive order: report https://t.co/7kzoaQvZRC

— Yonhap News Agency (@YonhapNews) January 29, 2017

Unlike many other places in the world a popular uprising in North Korea I don’t think will do much.  This is because the Kim regime will just kill the people and then pretend it didn’t happen just like what their primary sponsors in Beijing did at Tiananmen Square back in 1989.  What I do see the outside information flowing in doing is discrediting the regime with the North Korean public.  This would make it easier for someone in the military down the road perhaps to launch a coup with little public resistance:

North Korea’s former deputy ambassador to Britain has told a group of reporters that a “popular uprising” against North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un is imminent. Thae Yong Ho, who defected to South Korea in August of 2016, said that sanctions against the regime and its inability to control the flow of information about the outside world were weakening its grip on authority.

Thae’s comments came during a press conference in Seoul, the first time he has spoken to international media since his defection.

During the press conference, Thae, who speaks fluent English, declared that “Kim Jong-Un’s days are numbered,” as information about the outside world becomes more accessible. “Low-level dissent or criticism of the regime, until recently unthinkable, is becoming more frequent,” he added.  [Yahoo News]

You can read more at the link.

This combined photo, provided by North Korea’s ruling party organ Rodong Sinmun on Jan. 26, 2017, shows a new developed district under construction in Pyongyang, named “Ryomyong Street.” North Korean leader Kim Jong-un toured the construction site, ordering the project to be completed by April 15, the birth anniversary of late founder Kim Il-song, according to the newspaper.  (Yonhap)

This satellite image, captured from the website 38 North on Jan. 23, 2017, shows a series of improvements at the Kalma missile test site near North Korea’s eastern coastal city of Wonsan that the North has made. Joseph Bermudez, a North Korea military expert, said the satellite imagery raises the possibility of the regime carrying out a threatened test of an intercontinental ballistic missile from there. (Yonhap)

I have always thought that any deal signed with the North Koreans should first include the return of the USS Pueblo for this very reason:

North Korea boastfully threatened to strongly confront future U.S. hostility Monday, when it marked the 49th anniversary of its seizure of the U.S. intelligence boat Pueblo.

The 906-ton U.S. Navy ship was captured by the North in January 1968. The North claimed the ship violated its territorial waters, while the U.S. argued it was in international waters at the time of the attack. One crew member was killed in the attack, and 80 others and two civilian oceanographers were seized. All of them were freed from an 11-month captivity after the U.S. signed a letter of apology. Since then, Pueblo, named after a city in Colorado, has been on display at the War Victory Hall along the Taedong River in Pyongyang for propaganda purposes.

The U.S. should remember the shameful lesson from the Pueblo case, the North’s propaganda website Uriminjokkiri said.

“Our republic has the mighty military power to counter any kind of war that the U.S. chooses,” it said.

The North has the power to completely eliminate U.S. imperialism from the Earth, which has inflicted immeasurable misfortune and sufferings on the Korean people, it added.

“The U.S. will face a position more miserable than that in the Pueblo case if it forgets that lesson and frantically pursues new ways to provoke war against the North,” the North’s Central TV station said.  [Yonhap]