Hundreds of North Korean nuclear and missile experts have been collaborating with their Iranian counterparts in more than 10 locations across the Islamic state, a diplomatic source said Sunday.

The revelation lends credence to long-held suspicions that North Korea was helping Iran with a secret nuclear and missile program.

It also represents a new security challenge to the international community as it seeks to curb the nuclear ambitions of Pyongyang and Tehran, and thwart trading of nuclear and missile technology.

North Korea has long been suspected of being behind nuclear and missile proliferation in Iran, Syria, Myanmar and Pakistan.

“Hundreds of North Korean nuclear and missile engineers and scientists have been working at more than 10 sites (in Iran), including Natanz and Qom,” the source said, citing human intelligence he declined to identify for security reasons.

The source would not allow the specific number of North Koreans to be published, citing the sensitivity of the intelligence, and would not give further details on the extent of the collaboration. The source spoke on condition of anonymity because of the delicate nature of the issue.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

 North Korean and U.S. diplomats on Tuesday began a second day of talks during which Washington wants to see whether the North is indeed prepared to take concrete steps toward denuclearization before the stalled six-nation talks can resume.

North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan and Stephen Bosworth, Washington’s outgoing top envoy for Pyongyang, and his successor Glyn Davies sat down at the North’s U.N. mission in Geneva for the discussions, the second bilateral encounter between both sides in less than three months.   [Yonhap]

A senior lawmaker called on the United States, Friday, to redeploy tactical nuclear weapons to South Korea _ which were withdrawn in 1991 _ to thwart any nuclear threat from North Korea.

The remarks made by Rep. Chung Mong-joon of the ruling Grand National Party (GNP) were expected to cause a stir as a nuclear-free Korea has been a core U.S. policy toward the peninsula.

During a parliamentary session, Chung told Defense Minister Kim Kwan-jin that South Korea had no other cards to play to convince North Korea to give up its nuclear ambitions.  [Korea Times]

Read the rest at the link, but wouldn’t allowing South Korea to develop their own nuclear weapons be more of a deterrent to North Korea’s nuclear program instead of reintroducing US nuclear weapons?  This would of course anger the Chinese to have a nuclear armed South Korea right across from their major population centers, but it is the Chinese that have been allowing the North Koreans to develop their nuclear weapons.  I think South Korea has every right to develop theirs in response.   Just the legitimate threat to develop nuclear weapons in South Korea may be enough for the Chinese to begin to seriously pressure the North Koreans to curb their nuclear weapons program.

Anyone else have any thoughts on the ROK developing their own nuclear deterrent?

A U.S. nuclear scientist saw hundreds of centrifuges in North Korea this month, sources familiar with the matter said on Saturday, buttressing the case that Pyongyang has a uranium enrichment program giving it a second way to obtain fissile material for atomic bombs.

Washington has believed since 2002 that Pyongyang had such a program but the apparent sophistication of its effort could ignite fresh debate over how to deal with North Korea’s unpredictable leadership and whether to resume talks aimed at ending its nuclear ambitions.

North Korean officials told the expert, Siegfried Hecker of Stanford University, they had 2,000 centrifuges operating but the U.S. team that visited the country was unable to verify that, said the sources who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“But it certainly looked like an operating facility (to the team),” one source said.

Another source said Hecker was “stunned” by how modern and sophisticated the uranium enrichment facility was at North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear complex.

But Hecker was unable to spend enough time there to establish whether the plant was designed to produce only low-enriched uranium needed to make fuel for a power plant or the highly enriched uranium needed for bombs, he said.

The source said Hecker was told the facility was producing 3.5 percent enriched uranium, the level needed for a power plant. To produce bomb-grade fissile material, uranium must be enriched to more than 90 percent.

It was not immediately clear why North Korea showed Hecker the facility.  [Associated Press]

Basically what is going on here is that the North Koreans see that President Obama is weak politically coming off the decisive mid-term election losses for the Democrats and the poor results from the President’s Asian trip where he made no progress on Chinese currency manipulation or the FTA with South Korea. So what is this all similar to? Well President Bush after his decisive mid-term election losses in 2006. Bush was weak politically and he ended up selling out to the North Koreans in a vain effort to show some kind of foreign policy victory, which was nothing, but smoke and mirrors engineered by Chris Hill.

As STRATFOR has mentioned, the Obama administration will likely be turning towards foreign policy achievements with gridlock now inevitable in the Congress after the mid-term elections.  Foreign policy achievements is what President Obama will need for his re-election campaign.  So what if North Korea offers yet again to denuclearize for the right amount of money to just reneg later on after the 2012 election?  Maybe the North Koreans could blow up another cooling tower that they would just immediately rebuild again?  Would the Obama administration like the Bush administration willfully fall for North Korean lies yet again for political expediency?  The President does have natural appeasers working for him.  I guess we will see what happens.

In the mean time the North Koreans will continue to proliferate anyway.

If North Korea carries out a third nuclear test, it would seriously undermine international and regional security, the U.S. Pacific commander warned Friday.

Adm. Robert Willard’s comments were prompted by a South Korean newspaper report that said a U.S. spy satellite detected activity at the North’s main nuclear test site and that a detonation could occur in three months. South Korean officials played down the report, saying the activity didn’t seem unusual.

Responding to questions about the report, Willard told reporters that North Korea’s nuclear capabilities pose a grave threat to the region and that another atomic bomb test – which would be the country’s third – would be a “very serious matter.”

“I think the prospect of any next provocation … would be a very serious matter for the international community, for (South Korea) and for the alliance as a whole,” he said. He did not comment on the likelihood of such a test.

The head of the U.S. Pacific Command was speaking at a joint news conference in Seoul with Gen. Han Min-koo, chief of South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. Han said South Korea and the U.S. are keeping an eye on North Korea and are working to deter any planned test.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read the rest at the link, but I think a third nuclear test will hardly do anything to change regional security other than the North Koreans having a little less nuclear material to make more bombs with.

Abnormally high radiation levels were detected near the border between the two Koreas days after North Korea claimed to have mastered a complex technology key to manufacturing a hydrogen bomb, Seoul said Monday.

The Science Ministry said its investigation ruled out a nuclear test by North Korea, but failed to determine the source of the radiation. It said there was no evidence of a strong earthquake, which follows an atomic explosion.

On May 12, North Korea claimed its scientists succeeded in creating a nuclear fusion reaction — a technology necessary to manufacture a hydrogen bomb. In its announcement, the North did not say how it would use the technology, only calling it a “breakthrough toward the development of new energy.”

South Korean experts doubted the North actually made such a breakthrough. Scientists around the world have been experimenting with fusion for decades, but it has yet to be developed into a viable energy alternative.

On May 15, however, the atmospheric concentration of xenon — an inert gas released after a nuclear explosion or and radioactive leakage from a nuclear power plant — on the South Korean side their shared border was found to be eight times higher than normal, according to South Korea’s Science Ministry.

South Korea subsequently looked for signs of a powerful, artificially induced earthquake. Experts, however, found no signs of a such a quake in North Korea, a ministry statement said.- Associated Press

If it wasn’t an underground test, then it has to be a reactor leak. After Chernobyl, the west learned about the disaster through higher than normal radiation readings.

BTW the photo above was the one connected to the Associated Press article by Yahoo News.

A United Nations panel has accused North Korea of continuing to export nuclear and missile technology in defiance of a UN ban.

The experts said North Korea has used front companies and intermediaries to sell weapons and provide illegal assistance to Iran, Syria and Burma.

The preliminary report was compiled by a seven-member group that monitors Pyongyang’s compliance with sanctions.

The panel has called for further, urgent investigations.

DevicesThe 47-page report outlined a broad range of techniques used by North Korea to evade sanctions imposed by the UN after the North’s nuclear tests of 2006 and 2009, the Associated Press reports.

The report said North Korea had moved quickly to replace banned individuals and entities with others to enable it to continue the nuclear trade.

Among a number of “masking techniques”, it said the North describes exports falsely, mislabels shipping container contents, falsifies information about the destinations of goods and uses “multiple layers of intermediaries, shell companies, and financial institutions”.

The report said North Korea has a range of legitimate trade offices but also sustains links with international criminal organisations to pursue the banned trades.

An unnamed diplomat told Reuters the findings were “not entirely surprising”.

“The point is that North Korea has been providing that kind of aid to Iran, Syria and Burma,” he said.  [BBC]

The UN could have reported this long ago, but probably only released this report due to political pressure from the sinking of the Cheonan.  The real story here is whether anyone is going to do anything to go after these shell companies and inspect North Korean ships?

The U.S. will start discussions on the resumption of six-party nuclear talks with North Korea once it is known what caused the South Korean Navy corvette Cheonan to sink in the West Sea on March 26, a senior U.S. official said Wednesday.

Kurt Campbell, the U.S. assistant secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, made the remarks when he met reporters after a seminar hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. When asked about the resumption of the six-party talks, he said, “Let’s find out what happened in the sinking of the corvette” first.

“At this juncture, we told our South Korean friends that our primary objective is to work with them on the recovery of the ship,” he said. “And at that point we will be able to make some judgments about the way forward.”  [Chosun Ilbo]

A top North Korean nuclear envoy wants to visit the United States for rare talks next month, news reports said Saturday, amid a push by diplomats to revive negotiations on ending Pyongyang‘s nuclear program. Officials in Washington said no such trip was planned. North Korea is strongly pushing for Kim Kye Gwan‘s trip to the United States in March, but the U.S. has not authorized a visa for him, South Korea‘s Dong-a Ilbo newspaper reported, citing unidentified diplomatic sources.

Kim told his Chinese counterpart during this week’s meetings in Beijing he hopes to hold a bilateral meeting with the U.S. in March, Seoul’s JoongAng Ilbo newspaper reported, also citing unnamed diplomats.Kim left for Pyongyang Saturday after concluding a five-day trip to China, Yonhap news agency reported from Beijing.”Both sides had an in-depth discussion on the issue of boosting the (North Korea)-China relations and matters of speeding up the denuclearization of the peninsula,” the North’s Foreign Ministry said in comments carried by its official Korean Central News Agency.U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters Friday there were no plans for a visit by Kim, and no current U.S. discussions with North Korea about such a trip.  [USA Today]

It is pretty obvious the North Koreans are trying to get some cash out of Uncle Sam by offering the usual false promises in the wake of sanctions slowing their arms sales and the currency reform debacle.

North Korea could conduct another nuclear test next year in an attempt to solidify itself as an atomic power, a news report said Friday, citing a state-run South Korean think tank.

The Korea Institute for Defense Analyses said in a report that the communist nation won’t give up its nuclear ambitions and could test an atomic device in an attempt to assert itself as a nuclear weapons state, according to Yonhap news agency.

North Korea carried out its first-ever nuclear test in 2006 and the second, more powerful test blast in May. The think tank said the second test was five times as powerful as the first one and demonstrated progress Pyongyang had made in its capabilities to build atomic bombs, according to Yonhap.

A third test “would increase the possibility of the international community accepting North Korea as a nuclear weapons state,” the report was quoted as saying.

The North could also test-fire a long-range missile, and provoke military clashes with South Korea near their land, sea and air borders next year, Yonhap cited the report as saying.

Neither the report nor comments from the think tank were available Friday.  [Fox News]

I have said this over and over again, but the North Koreans have no intention of dismantling their nuclear program and people who think they can be persuaded to probably believe in unicorns as well.  The North Koreans will continue to perfect both their nuclear and missile capabilities while also trying to get maximum concessions from the international community for token gestures like the blowing up of the cooling tower.