I hope no one is getting to worked up by the latest North Korean threats:

The North Korean Army on Saturday threatened military action against the South, saying President Lee Myung-bak and his “puppet military warhawks” would force North Korean forces “to take a strong military retaliatory step to wipe them out.” The occasion was an accusation by the North that the South Korean Navy is sending warships into North Korean waters.

The statement came on the eve of U.S. president-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration, and the North has traditionally taken the opportunity of any transition in the U.S. to rattle the saber.  [Chosun Ilbo]

South Korea in response has added additional soldiers along the Demilitarized Zone between the two countries:

South Korea placed more soldiers at frontier guard posts and told its fishermen to refrain from sailing near North Korean waters on Sunday, a day after the North Korean military declared an “all-out confrontational posture” against the South and threatened a naval clash.  [New York Times]

Joe Biden was finally right about something, President Obama would be tested shortly after taking office, which doesn’t take a genius to figure out.  This is all pretty much rhetoric anyway, here is the real news coming out of North Korea:

The North Korean threat on Saturday came in the same day when an American scholar said North Korean officials told him that they had “weaponized” enough plutonium for roughly four or five nuclear bombs. Also Saturday, North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said the country would maintain its “status as a nuclear weapons state” as long as it perceived a nuclear threat from the United States.American intelligence officials have previously estimated that the North had harvested enough fuel for six or more bombs, although it has never been clear whether the North constructed the weapons. The scholar, Selig S. Harrison, said the officials had not defined what “weaponized” meant, but the implication was that they had built nuclear arms.  [New York Times]

If you don’t know who Selig Harrison is, he is just another North Korean apologist in the mold of Bruce Cumings and Kim Jong-Bill Richardson who the North Koreans have used before as a go between.  As One Free Korea rightfully points out other North Korea apologists like David Albright are suddenly quiet about North Korea’s uranium program:

One thing we do seem to have learned is that North Korea had a secret uranium enrichment program after all. That’s a pretty big concession when you consider that denying either the fact or the significance of North Korea’s uranium cheat is essential to any defense of Agreed Framework I, and hence of President Clinton’s North Korea policy. Some A.F. 1.0 defenders had tried to minimize the HEU cheat as insignificant, while others suggested that it was all just a trumped up necon causus belli. So what was it that shut all these people up? Was it the enriched uranium we found on those aluminum samples the North Koreans gave us, or was it the enriched uranium we found smeared all over their “disclosure” documents? Was it the damning admissions of A.Q. Khan and Benazir Bhutto? Or was it North Korea’s brazen 2002 admission, which some had feebly tried to ascribe to a translation error? Maybe North Korea’s 2007 admission that it procured centrifuge components, perhaps? All I know is that David Albright has been strangely quiet recently, and that Mike Chinoy’s book — now there is some really bad timing — was forgotten the week after it was rolled out. After all of the noise, the eerie unanimity of North Korea’s cheating includes William Perry, Condi Rice, and now, Hillary Clinton.

So what is next in the tensions between North & South Korea?  I think One Free Korea has analyzed this correctly, watch the NLL.