Recent satellite imagery shows no signs of North Korea making rocket or nuclear test preparations, rendering it impossible for such a test to happen on or before a key national holiday this week, a U.S. research institute said Monday.
Concerns have persisted that the North could conduct such tests around the 70th anniversary on Oct. 10 of the country’s ruling Workers’ Party in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions after Pyongyang strongly hinted at such possibilities.
But commercial satellite imagery, taken as recently as Sept. 27, shows that there is no such preparation going on at the North’s Sohae Satellite Launching Station or the Punggye-ri nuclear test site, making it impossible for such tests to take place this week, said Joel Wit, editor of the website 38 North.
“I think the bottom line here is that all these reports about possible long-range rocket or nuclear tests on or before Oct. 10th are just all wrong, all speculation. No evidence to support it whatsoever,” Wit said at a press briefing.
“I would even go as far to say that the North Koreans are probably having a lot of fun with their periodic interviews, talking about how it’s their right to launch a space-launch vehicle and explore space and everyone runs off and writes a story about it as if it’s going to happen tomorrow and it isn’t,” he said. [Yonhap]
A North Korean refugee recently gave a radio interview to PRI.org which focused on why North Koreans like South Korean clothes and beauty products as well as the importance of black markets in the country:
Would you wear skinny jeans if they were illegal? As it turns out, the answer is yes, at least for one young North Korean woman.
Danbi and I are browsing through a South Korean market, when she stops to admire a pair of slim fitting pants. “Girls just love these back home!” she declares. By home, she means a city in far-off North Korea.
She flips her hair dramatically, and laughs heartily, as she tries on a sparkly hair clip. She recalls, “We all wanted to be able to run our fingers through our hair like this. Like we saw in a South Korean TV show. But we couldn’t. Because we didn’t have enough shampoo in North Korea, so your fingers would just get stuck!”
Danbi is a 24-year-old North Korean refugee, who paints a picture of the totalitarian regime that’s quite different from the one we’re used to seeing, but an account supported by other defectors and those working with North Koreans. Yes, the country is rife with human rights abuses and grinding poverty. But Danbi, who took on her new name after fleeing, is from a city near the Chinese border — which has become surprisingly porous, and so she’s grown up in this presumably closed nation with a window to the outside world.
She says she shopped in black markets with smuggled foreign goods and watched American and South Korean TV shows, via smuggled USB sticks, since she was a kid. So by the time she entered junior high, Danbi says what she learned in school — that Americans can’t be trusted and South Koreans are poor — she doubted its truth. [Global Voices]
Analysts at 38North have a good posting up about why the Unha-3 rocket that North Korea has threatened to launch again is likely intended for space launch purposes:
But if the Unha-3 is intended for use as an ICBM, it’s not a very good one. The second- and third-stage engines don’t have enough thrust to efficiently deliver heavy warheads; a militarized Unha might deliver 800 kilograms of payload to Washington, DC. The North Koreans can probably make a nuclear warhead that small, but it would be a tight fit. With bigger upper-stage engines, which we know the North Koreans have, they could deliver substantially larger payloads. This would allow bigger and more powerful warheads, more decoys to counter US missile defenses, and a generally tougher and more robust system.
The Unha is also too heavy and cumbersome to be survivable in wartime. Too big for any mobile transporter, it can only be launched from fixed sites. Its highly corrosive liquid propellants require hours of pre-launch preparations. That’s a bad combination for North Korea; their fixed launch sites are going to be watched very closely, and particularly in a crisis, any indication that an ICBM is being prepared for launch could trigger a pre-emptive strike.
The same could be said of the old Soviet R-7. As an ICBM, it was pretty much a dud—the USSR never deployed more than 10, and retired them after less than a decade. As a space launch vehicle, its descendants are still in service today.
The North Koreans could press the Unha-3 into limited service as an ICBM, just as the USSR did with the R-7—a temporary measure, until something better is available. They can almost certainly build something better, and they appear to be trying. The KN-08 missile mock-ups, twice paraded through Pyongyang, are exactly the sort of thing a nation like North Korea would build if it wanted to use its eclectic mix of early 1960s rocket technologies to build an ICBM. It is small enough to be mobile and therefore survivable but with the performance (barely) to reach the enemy’s homeland. The Unha-3, by comparison, looks like it was designed to launch satellites rather than warheads. [38North]
I have no sympathy for idiots like this guy who cross into North Korea for their own selfish reasons and then when the going gets tough they willingly make themselves propaganda tools of the Kim regime and want South Korea and the US to get them out:
Joo Won-moon, a South Korean student at New York University, is escorted by a South Korean official into the South Monday at the border village of Panmunjom. Joo’s return ended a five-month detainment in Pyongyang after he illegally entered North Korea by crossing the Yalu River from China in April. Provided by the Ministry of Unification
North Korea Monday repatriated a South Korean student who had been detained for five months, an unexpected conciliatory gesture toward South Korea.
Joo Won-moon, a 21-year-old student at New York University and a green card holder for the U.S., was handed over to South Korean authorities at the border village of Panmunjom at around 5:30 p.m. Monday. Joo’s release followed a surprise announcement earlier in the day by the state-run Korean Central News Agency saying he would be freed. The announcement didn’t elaborate on what led it to the decision.
Joo crossed the Yalu River from China into North Korea in April and was arrested by North Korean guards. In an interview with CNN in May, he said he hoped his journey “could have a good effect in the relationship.”
Joo reappeared before cameras in a Sept. 25 press conference in Pyongyang at which he read what was seen as a carefully drafted statement praising North Korea and denying international accusations that the Pyongyang regime was responsible for gross human rights violations. He also called for a shift in the U.S.’s North Korea policy to engage the country more. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
On August 26, 2015, Korean Central Television (KCTV) aired a program entitled, Let’s Go Forward in Patriotism and Strength in the Forest Restoration Battle. The broadcast criticized several Forest Management Centers, including one in North Hwanghae Province’s Songnim. “They set up sun shades carelessly and then do not even water saplings properly. As a result saplings have become withered and yellow,” the program alleged.
The broadcast went on to a scathing critique of the tree nursery’s poor management: “The spraying equipment also does not properly work […] No more than 30% of the trees are alive […] The soil is overgrown with weeds […] One of the trees still has not sprouted.”
It also condemned the management of the Kangdong County tree nursery. “Because they do not properly conduct fertilizer management and also do not follow water guarantee measures, the saplings turn yellow and wither away. In the vegetable gardens there is so much seaweed that it is difficult to tell whether they are fields of saplings or meadows.”
“The fact that saplings can not grow properly is not due to unfavorable climate conditions but the defeatist and ‘non-owner’ work attitudes of the Forest Management Center workers and tree nursery work groups, who half-heartedly do their work and quit,” the broadcast added. [North Korea Econ Watch]
Shown in the picture released on Oct. 3, 2015, is a comparsion of satellite photos of the North Korean town of Rason along the border with China and Russia, taken on September 2013 (top) and 2015. (Google/Yonhap)
The Chinese have indicated that they will attend the 70th Anniversary of the Workers’ Party celebration in North Korea which leads me to believe the the Chinese government must have convinced the Kim regime to not begin another provocation cycle:
North Korea is likely to go for an ostentatious military parade for the celebration of the ruling party’s founding anniversary later this month, instead of a much-trumpeted launch of long-range missile, according to officials on Friday.
North Korea is expected to celebrate the landmark 70th anniversary of the foundation of the Workers’ Party of Korea on Oct. 10 with unusual events to show off its military might as the country has often done on major occasions.
Launch of a long-range missile has been the most speculated event, but officials said North Korea has so far not shown any signs of preparations for the launch before the anniversary date.
Instead, the country is putting together a military parade at an airfield in Pyongyang, which may involve new types of weapons.
“Various equipment and troops like combat jets, artillery equipment and missiles have been deployed to the Mirim Airport in Pyongyang. The North is preparing a parade event in commemoration of the party foundation,” a government official said. [Korea Times]
The Sunshiners are back and they just cannot bring themselves to admit that they wrong. All the Sunshine Policy did was keep one of the world’s worst governments in power with money and food aid that in turn was used to develop ballistic missiles and a nuclear program that are now a threat to the rest of the world:
At symposium, participants argue that if conciliatory policies had been continued, inter-Korean relations wouldn’t have deteriorated
At an academic conference to mark the eighth anniversary of the October 4 North-South Declaration, several voices called for a restoration of the Sunshine Policy and other initiatives to improve inter-Korean relations. On Oct. 2, the Roh Moo-hyun Foundation, Korea Peace Forum and Chatham House (Royal Institute of International Affairs) co-hosted an international symposium for the eighth anniversary of the October 4 declaration at the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts in central Seoul.
At the symposium, James Hoare, a Chatham House fellow who was charge d’affaires and HM Consul-General at the British Embassy in Pyongyang, said that what South and North need right now is a return to the Sunshine Policy initiatives enacted by Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun from 1997 to 2007. He added that if Lee Myung-bak had continued such initiatives instead of abandoning the October 4 Declaration, it would have helped inter-Korean relations immensely. Moon Jae-in, leader of the opposition New Politics Alliance for Democracy, claimed that if the initiatives of the October 4 declaration had continued, the lives of 70 million people would now be “brimming with hope and prosperity,” while the Korean Peninsula “reached out to the international community as a whole.” “The past eight years of Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye, however, have thrown inter-Korean relations back to the dark ages,” he added, adding that if measures such as the special zone of peace and cooperation in the West (Yellow) Sea and economic reunification had been properly implemented, the nation could have focused its efforts on conquering problems like stagnant growth, the decline of the middle class, and youth unemployment. The October 4 declaration included agreements to establish a “special zone of peace and cooperation” in the West Sea, including the city of Haeju and the surrounding maritime region, as well as the launch of joint fishing areas and peace districts. [Hankyoreh]
