By This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone except for maybe David Albright :
North Korea vowed Saturday to go ahead with uranium enrichment — a second track to developing a nuclear bomb — and weaponize all new plutonium it produces, denouncing a U.N. Security Council resolution that ratcheted up sanctions on it, according to Yonhap News.
"The process of uranium enrichment will be commenced," the North Korean Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency. The North, which drew condemnations from around the world after its second nuclear test on May 25, said it has made "enough success" in developing uranium enrichment technology and is experimenting. North Korea has long been accused of running a covert uranium enrichment program, which would provide the communist state with another way to build nuclear arms on top of reprocessing plutonium. South Korea believes the North has about 40 kilograms of plutonium, enough to produce at least six bombs. The North said Saturday it will "weaponize" all new plutonium it extracts, adding that "more than one third of the spent fuel rods has been reprocessed to date." [Korea Herald ]
12:44 am on June 13th, 2009 1
This is starting to get interesting…
Where's the kitchen sink???
This is starting to sound un-Pyongyang-like. Bluster is one thing. Coming off like a spoiled child crying because nobody will play with you is another…
…all this stuff is starting to make NK look — desperate.
It's using up all its big cards one after the other. Not using up but using them. North Korea is usually more deliberate than this.
I'm getting the tingling feeling again that the North might be worried about collapsing in the near future if it doesn't manage to get Obama and the US to start kicking in more material support…
Also, what does NK have left?
It can fire up another ICBM or nuke….but it can't push those button too much and get anywhere.
—If I were in the South Korean navy doing patrol duty in the West Sea or walking the DMZ fence line in the ROK army, I'd start being a little more careful the next 6 months or so…
12:53 am on June 13th, 2009 2
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/US/06/12/china.submar…
Does anyone have thoughts about this?
9:18 am on June 13th, 2009 3
So what? Having a Thermonuclear weapon that would have to be loaded on a flatbed and driven somewhere isn't exactly a strategic coup. They are definatley moving into crybaby mode.
2:39 pm on June 13th, 2009 4
Shooting incidents would logically be next in line. Look for small scale firefights or navel skirmishes. Minor incidents with large ramifications.
2:42 pm on June 13th, 2009 5
Exactly. That is what I've always thought and Dan on another thread pointed out some major examples of what Pyongyang was willing to do in the past.
I think some people in the media and elsewhere have forgotten to what extent North Korea would frequently enough go to to put pressure on neighbors and the world community in the past.
The bottom line is, the North Korean regime is the type that will do anything it deems necessary to accomplish its objectives.
There are limits to how far it can piss off China and to a lesser extent Russia, but that is about the only constraints it takes seriously and it will toss them aside if it feels that collapse is a possibility in the near future.