Category: North Korea

It looks like North Korea’s activities helping the Iranian military is continuing to expand:

An open-source intelligence publishing group says North Korea may be helping Iran build new rocket-launch facilities.

IHS Jane’s said Friday that a new rocket-launch pad was spotted by satellite in the city of Semnan some four hours east of the Iranian capital of Tehran. According to the London-based intelligence group, analysis suggests that Iran has been collaborating with North Korea to build the launch pad.

Jane’s said Iran made public its “Simorgh” space-launch vehicle (SLV) on February third but did not make public the location of the rocket’s launch complex.

Jane’s was quoted as saying that the platforms seen on the new gantry tower resemble those seen on the gantry tower at North Korea’s new launch pad at Tongchang and a drainage pit 170 meters in front of the pad also mirrors one at Pyongyang’s new west-coast launch site.

The group also said that the first stage of the Simorgh strongly resembles the North Korean Unha-Two, with four clustered engines and nearly the same dimensions.  [KBS Global]

You can read more about North Korea and Iran’s military cooperation here, here, and here.

I went on Google Earth and did a little exploring around the Semnan area in Iran and was able to located the launch facility supposedly constructed by the North Koreans:

This launch facility is located way out in a very isolated desert area:

Here is the lonely base camp that I imagine must suck to be stationed at:

Here is the actual launch site itself:

Here are two launch sites from the North Korea and judging from the Google Earth imagery they actually don’t like all that much a like:

Can any readers make out obvious similarities from the Google Earth imagery because I sure can’t.

This looks like it may be interesting read though the information provided by the defector is a bit dated:

A North Korean colonel who spent two decades going on European shopping sprees for his country’s rulers said Thursday the late dictator Kim Il Sung lived in luxury while many people struggled to survive in his impoverished communist nation.

Kim Jong Ryul, who spent 16 years under cover in Austria, also described how the “great leader” and his son and successor Kim Jong Il spent millions pampering and protecting themselves with Western goods — everything from luxury cars, carpets and exotic foods, to monitors that can detect heartbeats of people hiding behind walls and gold-plated handguns.

The colonel’s account — told in a new book by Austrian journalists Ingrid Steiner-Gashi and Dardan Gashi — shows the deep divide between the lifestyles of the North Korean leadership and their citizens, who sometimes must subsist eating tree bark, knowing they will be sent to labor camps if they criticize the government.  [MSNBC]

North Korean human rights activist Park Sang-hak wasn’t lying, he was back out there today sending up his propaganda balloons into North Korea:

Civic groups fly anti-N. Korea leaflets

Dec. 3, PAJU, South Korea — Members of conservative civic groups fly balloons carrying anti-North Korea leaflets in the South Korean border town of Paju, north of Seoul, on Dec. 3. In the leaflets, the civic groups urged the North to repatriate the hundreds of South Koreans abducted by North Korea since the end of the Korean War in 1953. (Yonhap)

North Korea has been complaining for months about the balloons filled with anti-Kim Jong-il propaganda leaflets that a coalition of North Korean defector, Christian, abductee, and Christian groups have been sending over the DMZ and into North Korea. North Korea has even threatened war over the leaflets showing how irritated the regime is with the leaflets which is probably a sign the leaflets are having its desired effect of undermining the regime. Well now the usual suspects have mobilized to try and stop these groups from sending their leaflets into North Korea:

South Korean groups sent propaganda leaflets critical of North Korea over the strictly controlled Demilitarized Zone on Tuesday as they scuffled with liberal activists who desperately tried to stop the launch.

The groups sent off a large balloon carrying 10,000 leaflets at a spot near the west coast, a day after North Korea tightened border traffic with South Korea in an initial retaliatory step against Seoul’s hardline policy toward Pyongyang.

The groups had prepared ten balloons to carry 100,000 leaflets but managed to send just one after clashing with dozens of liberal activists looking to prevent further damage to inter-Korean relations. The opposing members stole the remaining leaflets from a truck parked nearby.

One activist was hospitalized and another was taken into police custody, according to police officials.

Rarely seen since the Cold War, leaflets have recently emerged as a divisive issue between the two Koreas. Relations between Pyongyang and Seoul have worsened since the launch of conservative South Korean President Lee Myung-bak in February. (…)

North Korea has repeatedly threatened to cut all ties with Seoul if it fails to stop the conservative activists from sending the leaflets. Seoul also asked them to stop in order not to further enrage the North.

Pyongyang has mobilized soldiers en mass in a campaign to collect leaflets that have fallen on western coastal towns near the border, Washington-based Radio Free Asia reported earlier in the day, citing Chinese sources well-informed on North Korea.

Experts say the leaflets have struck a nerve because they often contain information on the 66-year-old Kim’s reported health problems, of which most North Koreans are likely unaware. (…)

Many of the leaflets have repeatedly criticized Kim for enjoying a lavish life while his people suffering from chronic food shortages, and urge North Koreans to rise up against the “killer whose death is approaching.”

The leaflets sometimes are mixed with U.S. dollar bills or Chinese yuan notes to entice North Koreans to pick them up. In the impoverished nation, one can live a month on one dollar, according to Park Sang-hak, a North Korea defector whose group has been sending the leaflets for about four years. [Yonhap]

It is interesting that soldiers are having to scour the countryside to look for balloons because it means the regime does not trust the population to turn in the leaflets in fear they may actually read them.

There is a great article in the Washington Post that tells more about one of the leaders sending out these propaganda leaflets. Park Sang-hak is a North Korean defector that actually worked in a propaganda department for North Korea before defecting. His hatred of Kim Jong-il is motivated by the fact his two uncles were killed and his fiance’ sexually abused because of his defection. Here is what Park had to say about the leftist groups that assaulted him:

It took more than an hour of pushing and shoving, and the help of a phalanx of South Korean policemen, before Park and others could launch a single balloon.

After it had soared into a cloudless sky and was carried north by the breeze, Park taunted his adversaries.

“You are the running dogs of Kim Jong Il!” he shouted. “You are trash!”

“You are afraid of unification!” they shouted back.

Park replied, “I am going to launch balloons every day, if the weather permits.”

Ironically if anyone is anti-unification it is the leftist groups that demand the South Korean government continue to subsidize Kim Jong-il’s lifestyle. I think Park would do well to contact some of the veteran organizations that protected the MacArthur Statue in Incheon when these leftists groups tried to tear it down a few years back. I’m sure there is nothing more satisfying for some of these retired ROK Marine Corps types then getting the chance to bash some of these leftist groups heads in.

Fresh after being caught with highly enriched uranium, the North Koreans are now announcing that they are going to have a hard time making a “complete declaration” of their nuclear activities:

A Japanese daily says North Korea’s top nuclear negotiator has hinted that uranium is not subject to its nuclear program disclosure.

The Tokyo Shimbun quoted Chinese officials as saying North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan told his Beijing counterpart Wu Dawei that plutonium is the key to the disclosure.

The report said the comment reflects Pyongyang’s intent to limit its disclosure to the production and use of plutonium.

The paper also predicted considerable difficulty in the “complete declaration” of North Korea’s nuclear program as requested by the parties to the six-way nuclear talks. [KBS]

Would anyone be surprised if North Korea misses the year end deadline to declare all their nuclear activities all together? I sure wouldn’t. The North Koreans are already saying the US should be “flexible” with the deadline. No matter what happens the Six Party Charade will continue and everyone knows it.

It will be interesting to see how the North Korea apologists will respond to this latest finding supporting a covert North Korean highly enriched uranium nuclear program:

U.S. scientists have discovered traces of enriched uranium on smelted aluminum tubing provided by North Korea, apparently contradicting Pyongyang’s denial that it had a clandestine nuclear program, according to U.S. and diplomatic sources.

The United States has long pointed to North Korea’s acquisition of thousands of aluminum tubes as evidence of such a program, saying the tubes could be used as the outer casing for centrifuges needed to spin hot uranium gas into the fuel for nuclear weapons. North Korea has denied that contention and, as part of a declaration on its nuclear programs due by the end of the year, recently provided the United States with a small sample to demonstrate that the tubes were used for conventional purposes. [Glenn Kessler – Washington Post]

The discovery of the high enriched uranium is going to make it very difficult for the State Department to continue to make excuses for Pyongyang all in the name of diplomacy especially with increased Congressional pressure on the State Department to get North Korea to come clean on their nuclear proliferation activities with Syria.Â

However, at least one of the usual North Korea apologists has come out to defend Pyongyang:

David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, said the equipment did not need to be in the same room but could have picked up the uranium traces from a person who was exposed to both sets of equipment. He said that several Energy Department laboratories have highly sophisticated methods of detecting the nuclear material from items that had been thoroughly decontaminated.

“There is a real art in extracting enriched uranium from samples,” Albright said. The labs can detect micrograms of enriched uranium, which he said is “way beyond what any normal radiation detector would pick up.” However, he said, such minute quantities could easily have come from other sources.

One Free Korea finds Albright’s claims unlikely:

Of course, that assumption — that the enriched uranium traces got onto the tubes in Pakistan, seems unlikely. Presumably, a shadowy axis-of-evil nuclear scientist of above-average intelligence would look for a less suspicious, uranium-trace-free source for its tubes. For obvious reasons, Khan’s own procurement network was decentralized and relied on a global network of suppliers for itself and its clients. The Iranians, for example, were smart enough to get their aluminum tubes through Russian suppliers. So why would any North Korean procurer buy aluminum tubes from the world’s most suspicious source, especially if its purpose was peaceful?

If the fact that North Korea admitted to Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly that they had a covert HEU program and the additional fact that Pakistan nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan confessed to selling HEU technology to North Korea was not enough evidence to convince North Korea apologists of Kim Jong-il’s untrustworthiness; don’t expect this latest finding too either.

Other views on this:
You can read more from One Free Korea here.
Ampontan see similarities with North Korea’s lies with the HEU issue and their lies over kidnapped Japanese citizens.
DPRK Forum sees another Team America moment in all of this.