Tag: North Korea

It seems that North Korea is very serious about stopping the Fighters for A Free North Korea from releasing balloons with copies of “The Interview” on it:

North Korea on Sunday renewed its threats against a South Korean civic group’s plan to send anti-Pyongyang fliers across the border via balloon, warning it will use “all the firepower strike means” to destroy them.

The message, posted as an open notice by the frontline units of the North’s Korean People’s Army (KPA), came about a week after a leading activist in Seoul reaffirmed his intent to scatter materials criticizing the communist regime across the border around March 26.

The date marks the 5th anniversary of Pyongyang’s torpedoing of the South Korean corvette Cheonan.

Park Sang-hak, head of the activist group, said earlier this month he and other North Korean defectors would release balloons holding 500,000 leaflets, as well as DVDs of the U.S. film “The Interview,” a comedy depicting a fictitious assassination of the North’s leader Kim Jong-un.

According to the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the KPA’s open notice said the campaign “deliberately (escalates) tension on the Korean peninsula where the situation has reached the brink of war” on top of the annual Seoul-Washington military drills that kicked off March 2.

Should the campaign be carried out, the North’s frontline army will “blow up” the balloons with “all the firepower strike means,” it said, adding that any countermeasures will “entail double and treble merciless retaliatory strikes.”

In October the two Koreas exchanged gunfire after the North attempted to shoot down balloons carrying similar leaflets. South Korea suffered no casualties or property damage.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link, but the group should just secretly fly the balloons across the border so the North Koreans do not have a chance to retaliate against them if they are dead set on doing this.

Kim is definitely going to Moscow, say Russian sources: http://t.co/o3WeS1qO5p

— NK NEWS (@nknewsorg) March 20, 2015

The North Koreans are claiming they have nuclear tipped missiles now:

 

A North Korean envoy says his country has developed nuclear missiles and is prepared to use them at any time.

North Korean Ambassador to Britain Hyun Hak Bong said in a recent interview with British broadcaster Sky News that his government would use the missiles in response to a nuclear attack by the United States.

Asked whether North Korea has the ability now to launch a nuclear missile, Hyun replied: “Any time. Any time. Yes.”

“If the United States strike us, we should strike back,” he said.

Asked if North Korea would only fire nuclear missiles in retaliation, Hyun replied: “We are a peace-loving people you know. We don’t want war but we are not afraid of war. This is our policy of the government.”

North Korea is thought to have a handful of crude nuclear bombs and has conducted three nuclear tests since 2006. But experts are divided on how far it has come in developing the technology needed to miniaturize warheads so they can be placed on missiles.   [Associated Press]

You can read the rest at the link, but South Korean intelligence does not think the North has advanced their nuclear weapons technology to be able to fit on a missile warhead.  One thing is clear though, even if they haven’t mastered the technology yet they are making it a national priority to do so.  This means the US military needs to plan for a nuclear North Korea in response.

The Interview: South Korea bans balloon drop of DVDs into North http://t.co/tPhGDM01oF

— South Korea Daily (@SouthKoreaDaily) March 20, 2015

Fantastic video on changing beauty standards of North & South Korea — in one minute @KungPaoKimchi @BuckTurgidson79 https://t.co/qkl0TJegfX

— A Fistful of Dollars (@goldmansachs666) March 18, 2015

It appears that the South Koreans are giving into the unilateral wage hikes the North Koreans having been demanding to provide so called “Social Security” to their workers at the Kaesong Industrial Complex:

As the North has rejected formal talks, the South is seeking a resolution through the Kaesong Industrial District Management Committee, a quasi-government organization, according to a senior unification ministry official.

“We are positively considering consultations between the committee and the (North’s) Central Special Development Guidance Bureau,” he told reporters on background.

The committee is ostensibly a North Korean organ but headed by South Korean government officials. Kim Nam-sik, South Korea’s former vice unification minister, chairs the committee.

The ministry official said it’s urgent to resolve the wage problem as 124 South Korean firms there will begin to pay March’s wages to around 53,000 North Korean employees on April 10.

“Once the wage issue is resolved, we can discuss the problem of the general labor rules,” he said.

His comments suggested the possibility of the South accepting the North’s decision on the 5.18-percent wage hike in a bid to buy time for dialogue on how to operate the Kaesong zone, which is susceptible to Pyongyang’s unpredictable measures.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

Shin-gate: Blaine Harden says he doesn't know how much profit his recently changed Camp 14 book has made to date http://t.co/Vee9HRNGo1

— NK NEWS (@nknewsorg) March 18, 2015

I think a lot of this growing trend has to do with the debt many of these people ran up to escape North Korea and then having a difficult time integrating into the hyper-competitive South Korean society:

A North Korean defector from North Hamgyong Province was given a prison sentence after getting caught smuggling drugs into South Korea from China last year.

The 38-year-old had looked in vain for a job and was desperate for money when she was approached by another defector who tempted her with the chance of some quick cash.

The defector told police she needed money to feed herself and felt rejected by South Korean society.

More defectors end up in prison here every year. In 2011 there were 51 defectors behind bars here, but that had risen to 97 in the first half of last year. Crimes range from drug possession, fraud and embezzlement to assault and murder.

A police officer said, “Defectors tend to be vulnerable to crime because they are often poor and face discrimination.”  [Chosun Ilbo]

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un inspects the construction site of a deep-sea fishing base on the east coast in an undated photo published by the North’s Korean Central News Agency on March 14, 2015. (KCNA-Yonhap)

Considering that this analysis is coming from David Albright this should be taken with some skepticism:

North Korea is estimated to have up to nine nuclear weapons built with highly enriched uranium, and uranium bombs could account for up to 60 percent of the North’s nuclear arsenal feared to grow to up to 100 weapons in five years, an American expert said.

David Albright, a top nuclear expert who heads the Institute for Science and International Security think tank, spoke about the forecast in an interview with Yonhap News Agency, saying highly enriched uranium is easier to make than weapons-grade plutonium.

Last month, Albright and Joel Wit, a security expert who runs the website 38 North, rang the alarm about the North’s growing nuclear capabilities with a surprising assessment that Pyongyang could expand its nuclear stockpile from 10-16 nuclear weapons to up to 100 weapons by 2020.

In that case, “40 percent of the arsenal would contain plutonium and 60 percent would contain weapons-grade uranium,” Albright said in the interview at his office in Washington. “The weapons-grade uranium cannot be forgotten by any means.”

Some experts have questioned the 100 weapons, including Olli Heinonen, a former International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) official. Albright said in response to such skepticism: “North Korea is not a country just starting to make nuclear weapons. North Korea has been making nuclear weapons for up to two decades.”

The worst case scenario is based on an assumption that the North has two centrifuges, not only the one at the country’s main nuclear complex, but also a secret facility whose existence has been widely suspected but has not been confirmed, he said.

“I went from deeply skeptical to believing that it’s possible … that they have another major centrifuge plant. We have to do more work … to see if that’s true. But I take the U.S. assessment intelligence that there is this earlier centrifuge plant much more seriously now than I did maybe five, six years ago,” he said.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link, but what is ironic about this is that Albright is the person who for years claimed that North Korea did not have a uranium program and accusations that they did he tried to fit into some Iraq War weapons of mass destruction Bush/Cheney plot.  It is interesting now to see him do a complete reversal on this issue.