Tag: North Korea

If anyone thought were going to stop all their nuclear programs because of a summit then they have no knowledge of past negotiations with the Kim regime.  Additionally here we go again with intelligence officials leaking classified information to the media:

As President Donald Trump touted a new era of diplomacy with the North Korean regime, a classified intelligence assessment appeared to tell a different story, according to several US intelligence officials.

The assessment revealed that, in recent months, North Korea had upped its production of fuel for nuclear weapons at several secret sites, according to over a dozen intelligence officials cited in an NBC News report published Friday. The officials said they believe North Korean leader Kim Jong Un may be trying to conceal the secret facilities from the US.

“Work is ongoing to deceive us on the number of facilities, the number of weapons, the number of missiles,” one senior US intelligence official said to NBC News. “We are watching closely.”

According to five US officials cited by NBC News, the North Korean regime was increasing production of enriched uranium, even as relations with the US improved following the 2018 Winter Olympics. And since the leaders of both countries held a summit in Singapore in mid-June, the Trump administration has already delivered some concessions to the North.  [Business Insider]

You can read more at the link, but it only makes sense that the North Koreans are going to rush to increase the amount of fuel and weapons they have to maximize their bargaining position.  Like I have always said I seriously doubt the regime will completely denuclearize.

On a side note, I do find it interesting how the media now is highly critical of North Korean double dealing when during past negotiations many in the media made excuses for North Korean double dealing.

This is why South Korea dreads a collapse of the Kim regime:

When Chang Ho Kim was living in North Korea, information trickled in from China about the world outside the closed country. Through the lens of pirated movies, he says, America had looked to Kim like “a very rich and luxurious place”.

In 1997, at the height of a famine that killed around one million people, Kim escaped with his wife into China, then Mongolia, then to South Korea.

Defectors from the North automatically become South Korean citizens after a mandatory three-month transition that is part debriefing, part re-education. Most North Korean defectors in the South stand out, and the Kims were no exception. They have distinct accents, and are often shorter and slighter with darker, sallow skin from years of malnutrition. It’s hard to avoid South Koreans’ prejudice and suspicions that North Koreans are spies.

Remembering the Hollywood images of the US, the Kims decided to make their way to the US illegally through a broker.

But for the Kims, and others like them, life in the US is not necessarily easier.

The American celluloid dream comes with skyrocketing price tags. North Koreans arrive with little or no experience of bills, rent, and no means to cope with the lack of social services and health insurance that illegal immigrants must navigate.

“American life is so hard. Money, money, money,” said Pastor Young Gu Kim, an evangelical South Korean immigrant who helps defectors. “Some defectors told me, ‘Oh pastor, sometimes I miss it over there.’”

Like Chang Ho Kim, many North Koreans enter illegally and settle in Los Angeles, amid the large population of ethnic Koreans. Nearly 200 former North Koreans live in Los Angeles, advocacy groups say, but exact numbers are unknown.  [The Guardian]

You can read more at the link, but North Koreans are not socialized to live in a western society that largely demands individual initiative to work hard and make money to support ones self.  Imagine if millions of North Koreans showed up in South Korea instead of the small trickle that currently exists if the regime was to collapse.  The social problems this would cause would be enormous and thus why the ROK government is pushing a policy of gradual reunification instead of regime collapse.

As Congress passes the North Korea Human Rights Reauthorization Act, @HouseForeign Chmn Ed Royce writes, "Seoul’s recent efforts to silence North Korean human rights advocates are counterproductive and deeply disturbing.” https://t.co/TrMBfyd1ES via @houseforeign

— Joshua Stanton (@freekorea_us) June 28, 2018

My usual caveats apply when it comes to anonymous sources providing stories like this out of North Korea:

A senior North Korean military officer who told colleagues they no longer needed to “suffer and tighten our belts to make rockets and nuclear weapons” has been executed by firing squad, according to reports in dissident media.

The officer was named by the Seoul-based Daily NK news website as Hyon Ju-song, a 56-year-old lieutenant general who was serving as director of the services inspection division of the People’s Armed Forces.

Lt. Gen. Hyon appears to have become excited at the possibility that the detente that has taken place on the Korean Peninsula this year will develop into full-blown peace and got ahead of official party policy.

Quoting one of the organisation’s “citizen reporters” in the North, Daily NK said Lt. Gen. Hyon had been “on the fast track to success” within the military, but was arrested after making unguarded comments during a visit to one of the regime’s most important facilities.

“While checking the oil supplies for the Sohae Satellite Launching Station during the comprehensive inspections of wartime supplies on April 10, Hyon stated, ‘We no longer have to suffer and tighten our belts to make rockets or nuclear weapons’. This was seen as an abuse of authority and a treasonous statement that opposed the Party’s military-first policy”, the site reported.   [The Telegraph]

You can read more at the link.

This is an example of why the South Koreans need the US to agree to drop sanctions before they can begin any projects with North Korea:

After the two Koreas agreed on Tuesday to connect their railroads and work together on modernizing the North’s infrastructure, one question looms: Is the project even possible?

If South Korea were to provide North Korea with vehicles, machinery and other equipment for track construction, it would violate United Nations Security Council Resolution 2397, which prohibits the export of industrial equipment to the North. The sanctions, passed unanimously on Dec. 22, 2017, came after the North tested an intercontinental ballistic missile on Nov. 29 of last year.

During the meeting between officials from the two Koreas on Tuesday, both sides agreed to boost cooperation in modernizing North Korea’s rails, stating the end goal was “balanced development of the national economy and co-prosperity.”

South Korean President Moon Jae-in has espoused a grand vision of creating a single market with the two Koreas to lay the foundation for unification, job creation and economic growth in both countries.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read much more at the link, but I expect that the Kim regime will continue to play nice in order to convince President Trump to drop sanctions for little to nothing in return.  I would not be surprised if the Kim regime decides to continue to play nice until after the mid-term elections in the US.  This will give them an assessment of the landscape in the US moving forward in 2019.

Here is some more interesting imagery analysis from the folks at 38 North:

Commercial satellite imagery from June 21 indicates that improvements to the infrastructure at North Korea’s Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center are continuing at a rapid pace. Modifications to the 5 MWe plutonium production reactor’s cooling system appear complete, but a less-than-normal cooling water discharge from the outfall pipe makes a determination of the reactor’s operational status difficult. The status of the Radiochemical Laboratory—used to separate plutonium from spent fuel rods—remains uncertain, although the associated Thermal Plant has likely continued operations, and a small non-industrial building of an unknown purpose has been newly erected near the cooling tower. Construction continues on support facilities throughout other operational areas of Yongbyon, especially at the Experimental Light Water Reactor (ELWR), where the new engineering office building appears externally complete and a small building similar to the one observed at the Radiochemical Laboratory has been erected.

Continued work at the Yongbyon facility should not be seen as having any relationship to North Korea’s pledge to denuclearize. The North’s nuclear cadre can be expected to proceed with business as usual until specific orders are issued from Pyongyang.  [38 North]

You can read much more and see the imagery analysis at the link.

I would not be surprised if the Kim regime is trying to rush completion of these projects and then try and declare that these facilities are for peaceful nuclear energy use.  The North Koreans could argue that South Korea has nuclear power plants, why can’t they?  This would allow the regime to maintain the ability to quickly process material for nuclear weapons again if they were to agree to give up the nuclear weapons they already have.

By the way, ROK Heads may remember that 38 North was part of the US-Korea Institute that the Moon administration tried to get certain employees of the think tank removed from because of their conservative leanings.  Since USKI would not remove the employees the Korean government cut funding and USKI was shutdown.  The shutdown of the USKI was part of a larger effort by the Moon administration to take control of media in South Korea.  Articles like this one showing continued nuclear upgrades by North Korea despite pledges to denuclearize are the types of articles the Moon administration may have wanted to suppress if they still controlled USKI.  It is good to see that 38 North has continued to publish despite the shutdown of the USKI.

ROK Drop favorite Michael Breen writes in the Korea Times that critics of President Trump’s North Korea policy need to show more patience.  Good luck with that ever happening, but he does accurately depict the media environment that is driving much of the negative criticism against Trump:

And yet, a majority of experts have criticized the American president. Why? Failure to secure a more detailed agreement. Talk about impatience.

This criticism is widespread, despite the fact that everyone accepts that, in contrast to many summit meetings where the top leaders sign off on agreements reached between their respective teams, this one was intended to kickstart a process.

So why was the analysis not about a good start?

I believe there are two parts to the answer and they are not easily separated. One is the good faith expert viewpoint and the other is the media environment in which it is expressed.  (…………)

The error in my opinion derives from media obsession with the person of the American president. This both slants reporting and media commentary and influences the way experts deliver their opinions.

If truth be told, media love Donald Trump. He just has to scratch his head and it’s newsworthy. Underlying almost all coverage is a view that he is morally and psychologically unfit to be president. (This is partly because he is a Republican, a party that has almost zero support among news reporters, and partly because, well, he is kind of unorthodox.)

The daily Trump story satisfies on the titillation level ― look what the idiot has done now ― and on the media self-righteousness level ― be warned, this is serious, this man has his finger on the button.

Had Barack Obama held this summit with Kim and achieved the same result, he would probably be up for his second Nobel Peace Prize. But because it’s Trump, I expect that even if the North does de-nuclearize, sign a Korean war peace treaty, and open an embassy in Pyongyang and open the gulag, Trump will still be found wanting.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.

South Korean President Considering Joint 2030 World Cup Bid With North Korea via @forbes https://t.co/UiTHrJKvsy

— NorthKoreaRealTime (@BuckTurgidson79) June 24, 2018

Colonel-level military officials of the two Koreas meet at the Customs, Immigration, and Quarantine office in Paju, just south of the inter-Korean border, on June 25, 2018, in this photo provided by the Defense Ministry. The officials met to discuss restoring their military communication lines. (Yonhap)

The North Koreans like to use these family reunions to appeal to the emotions of South Koreans which then makes them useful bargaining chips by threatening to cancel them if they don’t get what they want from the ROK government:

South Korea began a process Monday to select those who will meet their long-separated family members in North Korea in late August.

The two Koreas agreed to hold their first family reunion event in nearly three years at the North’s Mount Kumgang resort from Aug. 20-26, a follow-up to the April 27 summit deal.

It would enable 100 South Korean people, mostly elderly ones, to get together with their families across the border, decades after being separated by the 1950-53 Korean War.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link, but these reunions have also in the past been a cottage industry for the regime to make money by holding them at the Kumgang Resort on the east coast of North Korea.  I suspect the regime also is using the reunions to promote the resort in its efforts to get sanctions dropped and tourism reopened to Gumgang resort and other nearby facilities.