Members of the North’s General Federation of Trade Unions of Korea present an electric locomotive they made to mark the seventh congress of the organization on Oct. 23, 2016, in Pyongyang. The country’s key media outlet, the Korean Central News Agency, which released this photo said the workers “briskly conducted the do-good-thing movement” to make the locomotive. (For Use Only in the Republic of Korea. No Redistribution) (Yonhap)
The U.S. policy of trying to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons “is probably a lost cause” and the best that could be hoped for is a cap on the country’s nuclear capability, the Director of U.S. National Intelligence James Clapper said on Tuesday.
However, underscoring conflicting views in the Obama administration, the State Department said U.S. policy was unchanged and continued to be to seek the “verifiable denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula.
President Barack Obama has repeatedly stated that the United States will never accept North Korean as a nuclear-armed state.
Clapper made clear at an event at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank in New York he did not think that the policy the administration has stuck to, in spite of repeated North Korean nuclear tests, was realistic.
“I think the notion of getting the North Koreans to denuclearize is probably a lost cause,” Clapper said at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank in New York. “They are not going to do that – that is their ticket to survival.” [Reuters]
Here is an interesting article that speculates on whether North Korea would have invaded South Korea back in 1983 if the assassination attempt on President Chun Doo-hwan was successful?:
On October 9, 1983, a bomb exploded at the Martyr’s Mausoleum in Rangoon, the capital of Burma. As part of an official visit to the country, then-Republic of Korea President Chun Doo-hwan had been scheduled to visit the mausoleum to pay respects to Aung San, one of the founders of Burma. The results were devastating – 21 dead, 46 injured. Among the dead were prominent members of the South Korean government, including the deputy prime minister and foreign minister. Fortunately, the South Korean president survived.
Chun Doo-hwan was a career Republic of Korea Army officer who came to power under contentious circumstances. His predecessor was Park Chung-hee, another Army officer and father of the current South Korean President Park Geun-hye. Chung-hee was assassinated on October 26, 1979. During an unclear political situation, Chun and military forces loyal to him executed a successful coup on December 12, 1979. Afterwards, Chun established martial law, squashed dissent, and ruled South Korea through 1987 as a military dictatorship, until the democracy movement brought the country its first truly free elections.
In part, President Chun owed his life to his American advisers. Assassination attempts and terrorism on the part of North Korea was a real threat at the time and concern for the president’s safety prompted the Americans to suggest Chun’s flight route be placed further away from the coasts of China and Vietnam. This caused a delay in his schedule, forcing him to arrive later than the rest of his entourage. North Korean agents confused the arrival of the South Korean ambassador with that of the president, resulting in a premature detonation. Had President Chun ignored the advice of his foreign advisers and maintained the original schedule, it is very likely he would have been present at the time of the explosion and would have been killed or maimed.
The possible implications of Chun’s assassination attempt in Rangoon would not be fully known, however, until over a decade later. Kang Myung-do, son-in-law of then-North Korean Premier Kang Song-san, defected to the South in 1994. As he changed allegiances, he brought with him stories. What a story he had to share about the Rangoon bombing.
Kang told the late professor and writer Don Oberdorfer, who was conducting research for a book, that North Korea had been anticipating civil unrest on the scale of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, which was pacified through the brute force of the South Korean military. The “massacre,” as it has been described, was a day of infamy for South Korea, and resulted in well over a hundred dead and thousands injured. Kang specifically noted that discharges from the North Korean military had been “slowed or stopped” in preparation for what might occur.
It does not take much knowledge or imagination to reasonably assume that North Korea may very well have intended to invade the South in the event of mass civil unrest. With a nation reeling from its second presidential assassination in four years, the South Korean government in crisis, and the military with its hands full in bringing order to chaos, there would probably be few scenarios better for Pyongyang to exploit in its eternal quest to reunite the peninsula. [National Interest]
You can read the rest at the link, but I think even if Chun was killed that the North Koreans would not have invaded unless they were given support by China. The US has the nuclear trump card that can be played to defeat any North Korean invasion. Without the support of the Chinese nuclear deterrent I don’t see how they could have won a conflict on the peninsula. It seems the assassination was more for trying to create massive internal unrest within South Korea that could eventually lead to a more Pyongyang friendly government. Maybe one day when the Kim regime finally falls their national archives will shed light on what their true intentions were.
Here is the status of the unofficial talks between the US and North Korea going on in Malaysia:
In this two separate photos taken on Oct. 22, 2016, in a hotel in Kuala Lumpur, former U.S. deputy nuclear negotiator Joseph R. DeTrani (L) and North Korea’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations Jang Il-hun (R) talk to reporters on the sidelines of their informal dialogue held from Friday to Saturday over pending issues. (Yonhap)
A North Korean delegation led by its deputy foreign minister held talks with former government officials of the United States here for a second day on Saturday to discuss pending issues such as the North’s nuclear and missile tests.
The U.S.-North Korea contact, although it is informal or unofficial, came after North Korea conducted its fifth and most powerful nuclear test in September, just eight months after its previous nuke test.
“I came here through Beijing,” the North’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations Jang Il-hun told Yonhap News Agency. As for topics discussed during the dialogue, he said the two sides talked about several “pending issues and each other’s thoughts on them.”
Asked whether there was an offer from the U.S. to stop its nuclear and missile tests, he fell short of clarifying, but said, “hopely moving forward.”
North Korea’s vice foreign minister Han Song-ryol was also among the five-member delegation. The four-member U.S. delegation included Robert Gallucci, who negotiated a landmark 1994 nuclear freeze deal with Pyongyang; former U.S. deputy nuclear negotiator Joseph R. DeTrani; and Leon Sigal, director of the Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in New York.
Sigal told Yonhap News that the two parties mainly discussed the North’s nuclear and missile issues during the informal dialogue.
The North stuck to its stance that it wants to sign a peace treaty with the U.S. before it stops its nuclear and missile programs. But the U.S. reiterated its position that scrapping nuclear programs should be put before anything else, Sigal said. [Yonhap]
A Chinese boat carrying the North Korean flag enters the dock of the Korean Coast Guard in Incheon, west of Seoul, on Oct. 18, 2016. The boat was seized by the coast guard the previous day, while catching fish illegally after crossing a western inter-Korean maritime border into the South Korean side. Cash-strapped North Korea has reportedly sold the rights to its western territorial waters to Chinese fishermen. Chinese illegal fishing is a chronic headache to South Korea. (Yonhap)
It looks like the North Koreans are preparing for their next provocation:
North Korea said Thursday it will continue to launch satellites into space despite South Korea’s condemnation, which analysts said points toward Pyongyang testing a long-range rocket soon.
North Korean satellites will continue going up even as South Korea condemns Pyongyang’s move, an unidentified spokesman at North Korea’s bureau on space development was quoted as saying by the country’s media.
“We will march toward the goal of conquering space by firing off more satellites in accordance with our five-year space development program,” the spokesman said.
The report came amid growing speculation that North Korea is likely to launch a long-range rocket in the not-too-distant future after its last launch in February.
Pyongyang has claimed it has the right to develop its space program by putting satellites into orbit, but Seoul and Washington have viewed Pyongyang’s move as a disguised test for its ballistic missile technology. [Yonhap]
You can read more at the link, but I wonder if they will time it to coincide with the US Presidential election?
