Tag: North Korea

The Kim regime has some parting words for the outgoing President:

North Korea told outgoing President Barack Obama to get “packing” as it denounced a recent U.S. crackdown against human-rights abuses in the isolated communist state.

The United States blacklisted seven senior North Koreans, including leader Kim Jong Un’s sister, and two agencies last week, citing links to such abuses.

The State Department also released a report saying North Korea’s rights record is among the worst in the world.

The North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency called the moves “desperate efforts” by the Obama administration “to keep afloat their hostile policy” toward Pyongyang before leaving the White House.

Donald Trump is to be sworn in as U.S. president on Friday.

“Obama would be well advised not to waste time taking issue with [others’] ‘human rights issue’ but make good arrangements for packing in the White House,” KCNA said in a commentary posted Monday.

“He had better repent of the pain and misfortune he has brought to so many Americans and other people of the world by creating the worst human rights situation in the U.S. during his tenure of office,” it added.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read more at the link, but on a positive not at least the North Koreans did not use any racial slurs when referring to the President.

Yonhap is reporting that the North may have two ICBMs ready to launch in the coming days or weeks:

North Korea has probably built two missiles presumed to be intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and placed them on mobile launchers for test-firing in the near future, military officials said Thursday.

The two missiles are estimated to not exceed 15 meters in length, making them shorter than the North’s existing ICBMs, the 19-20 meter-long KN-08 and the 17-18 meter-long KN-14, the officials familiar with the matter told Yonhap News Agency.

The North appears to have intentionally leaked the new missiles to send a “strategic message” to the incoming government of Donald Trump who takes office on Friday, they said.

The officials didn’t provide the exact date for when the missiles were picked up by intelligence, although it is estimated that the U.S. detected them on Monday when the U.S. Navy hurriedly moved its sea-based X-band radar system to the western part of the Pacific Ocean from seas off Hawaii.

Experts say the North is likely to fire off a new ballistic missile that flies some 2,500 kilometers and claim that it has succeeded in launching an ICBM. An ICBM usually has a range exceeding 5,500 kilometers.

“It will take at least two to three years for Pyongyang to master ICBM capabilities and five more years before they can be deployed operationally,” said Kim Dong-yeob, a professor at Kyungnam University’s North Korean studies school.

The North is widely expected to test-fire a missile when the Trump government outlines its policies toward the communist state or around the time of the annual Seoul-Washington joint military drill kickoff in March.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link, but considering their trouble getting the Musudan missile to reliably work it seems the chances of a road mobile ICBM working is pretty low.

North Korea is doubling down on its viewpoint that it has the right just like any other sovereign country to test an ICBM.  Of note though is that they are saying the ICBM test is part of its space program:

 

North Korean criticized the international community on Tuesday for its double standard toward the country’s development of intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said in his New Year’s Day address that the country has entered the final stage of preparations to test fire an ICBM, an apparent warning that the reclusive country is perfecting the capability to hit the continental United States with nukes.

“Acting by the double-dealing standard unilaterally set by the U.S. in its interests, the UN brands the legitimate exercise of the sovereignty by an independent country as ‘illegal’ and its measure for self-defense provocation,” the North’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said in an English-language report monitored in Seoul.

Pyongyang’s state-run media further said the North’s test firing is the country’s “exercise of the right to launch satellites for peaceful purposes, justified by international law.”  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link, but the way I look at it is if the Kim regime wants to be treated like a normal country, then act like a normal country.

Whenever noted North Korean scholar Dr. Andrei Lankov writes something I take notice.  In his latest op-ed published in Bloomberg he is advocating that the incoming Trump administration negotiate a deal for a nuclear and missile freeze with North Korea:

Finally, some observers seem to hold out hope that Trump, a self-described “great” dealmaker, might be able to talk Kim out of his nukes in direct negotiations. This, too, is a futile idea. U.S. and North Korean interests are fundamentally incompatible. North Korean leaders fear that giving up their nukes would leave them dangerously vulnerable; they only too well remember what happened to Moammar Qaddafi after he negotiated away his nuclear program.

The truth is that for more than a decade, there’s been no real chance of fully eliminating the North’s nuclear program. Even now, though, the U.S. could negotiate something better than the current situation: a verifiable freeze on nuclear and missile testing, before North Korea develops an ICBM.

Of course, Kim isn’t going to restrain himself for free. In return, he will demand many things — a hefty aid package, above all, but also political concessions, including a formal peace treaty. No doubt his regime will probably try to cheat.

The opponents of such a compromise will describe it as a terrible precedent, even blackmail — and they may be right. Unlike Iran, North Korea will remain a nuclear power even after signing such a deal. But the alternatives — either a major war that drags in the U.S. and China, or a fully armed North with the proven capacity to attack the U.S. mainland — are worse. As long as there’s still a chance of striking such a compromise, the new U.S. President should be doing everything he can to seize it.  [Bloomberg]

I do not see the point of a nuclear freeze in return for a bunch of free goodies to the Kim regime in return for something that even Dr. Lankov admits they will try and cheat on.  Plus by agreeing to sign a peace treaty with North Korea that puts into question the entire existence of the US-ROK alliance which is why the Kim regime has been pressing so hard for it.  The Kim regime knows they have no chance of reunifying the peninsula on their terms as long as the US-ROK alliance is in place.

It seems to me a peace treaty should not be part of a freeze deal and whatever deal that is signed should include robust inspections and the risk of a retaliatory bombing strike if it is not complied with.  The risk of war on the peninsula by noncompliance by the Kim regime would give motivation to the Chinese to make sure the Kim regime is complying with the deal.

Yonhap has a good interview published with an aerospace engineer that outlines what North Korea’s testing of the ICBM capability would likely look like:

John Schilling, an aerospace engineer with expertise in the North’s missile programs, said that the North’s ICBM test could involve a missile variant of the space launch vehicle Unha or the road-mobile KN-08 missile or its upgraded version KN-14.

A test of the Unha rocket fitted with a reentry vehicle large enough for a nuclear warhead would likely work, but it would put “an end to any pretense or hope of a peaceful space program,” the expert said.  (……..)

Schilling also noted the first American ICBM, the SM-65 Atlas, failed 26 seconds into its maiden flight and eight tests were conducted over the course of a year, with only two fully successful. The first all-up test of the competing SM-68 Titan was even shorter, exploding on the launch pad, he said.

“We should expect North Korean ICBMs to follow a similar path — a series of early failures leading to an operational capability even with a spotty testing record,” the expert said.

The North is unlikely to conduct an ICBM test as frequently as it did with the intermediate-range Musudan missile that was tested eight times between April and October last year, he said.

“Pyongyang can afford to keep up that pace in a full-scale ICBM development program. Its aerospace industry hasn’t demonstrated the production capacity needed to test an ICBM every month,” he said. ” One test every three to six months would be more realistic, at least in the long run, so this is not a process that will be completed in 2017.”

Should the North decide to test the KN-08 or KN-14, it is expected to use existing launch sites, rather than a mobile launcher, in order to reduce chances of failure and to learn as much as possible from the failures, he said.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

North Korea’s newly built satellite control center in Pyongyang. [CNN]

According to the article the ship was transporting rice from North Korea’s west coast to its east coast.  I wonder if there was anything else was on the ship?:

The Japanese Coast Guard (JCG) went to the rescue after receiving a distress signal from the ship, which had run into difficulties off Japan’s Kyushu Prefecture, 38 miles (61 kilometers) southwest of the Goto Islands, a spokesman said.

The crew members spent a short time in Japanese custody before being collected by a tanker to take them back to North Korea.  [CNN]

CNN has a good article published where various pictures recently taken in North Korea are commented on by North Korean defectors.  Here is my favorite comment:

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sits on the bed during a visit to a silk factory in Pyongyang, his second public outing of the year, in this photo taken from the North’s Central TV Broadcasting Station on Jan. 8, 2017. (Yonhap)

It may not be legal to purchase or smoke marijuana in North Korea, but the North Koreans are well known for smuggling drugs into other countries to raise foreign currency.

North Korea has been getting some pretty high praise lately from the stoner world.

Marijuana news outlets including High Times, Merry Jane and Green Rush — along with British tabloids, which always love a good yarn — are hailing the North as a pothead paradise and maybe even the next Amsterdam of pot tourism. They’ve reported North Korean marijuana to be legal, abundant and mind-blowingly cheap, sold openly to Chinese and Russian tourists at a major market on the North’s border for about $3 a pound.

But seriously, North Korea? Baked?

The claim that marijuana is legal in North Korea is not true: The penal code lists it as a controlled substance in the same category as cocaine and heroin. And the person who would likely help any American charged with a crime in North Korea emphatically rejects the idea that the ban is not enforced.

“There should be no doubt that drugs, including marijuana, are illegal here,” said Torkel Stiernlof, the Swedish ambassador. The United States has no diplomatic relations with the North, so Sweden’s embassy acts as a middleman when U.S. citizens run afoul of North Korean laws.

“One can’t buy it legally and it would be a criminal offense to smoke it,” Stiernlof said. He said that if a foreigner caught violating drug laws in North Korea happened to be an American citizen, he or she could “expect no leniency whatsoever.”  [ABC News]

You can read more at the link.