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The AP:
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - South Korean government officials said North Korea performed its first-ever nuclear weapons test Monday, the South's Yonhap news agency reported.
South Korean officials could not immediately confirm the report.
South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun convened an urgent meeting of security advisers over the issue, Yonhap reported.
The North said last week it would conduct a nuclear test as part of its deterrent against a possible U.S. invasion.
The Clinton-Kim 1994 Agreement, midwifed by Jummy Carter, bears its fruit.
How long until the gangster regime sells its wares to jihadists?
The Atlantic Monthly would do a great public service if it would make last month's Robert Kaplan cover story on North Korea available for everyone to read. (Update: The article is here.)
Key graphs:
What should concentrate the minds of American strategists is not Kim’s missiles per se but rather what his decision to launch them says about the stability of his regime. Middle- and upper-middle-level U.S. officers based in South Korea and Japan are planning for a meltdown of North Korea that, within days or even hours of its occurrence, could present the world—meaning, really, the American military—with the greatest stabilization operation since the end of World War II. “It could be the mother of all humanitarian relief operations,” Army Special Forces Colonel David Maxwell told me. On one day, a semi-starving population of 23 million people would be Kim Jong Il’s responsibility; on the next, it would be the U.S. military’s, which would have to work out an arrangement with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (among others) about how to manage the crisis.
Fortunately, the demise of North Korea is more likely to be drawn out. Robert Collins, a retired Army master sergeant and now a civilian area expert for the American military in South Korea, outlined for me seven phases of collapse in the North:
Phase One: resource depletion;
Phase Two: the failure to maintain infrastructure around the country because of resource depletion;
Phase Three: the rise of independent fiefs informally controlled by local party apparatchiks or warlords, along with widespread corruption to circumvent a failing central government;
Phase Four: the attempted suppression of these fiefs by the KFR once it feels that they have become powerful enough;
Phase Five: active resistance against the central government;
Phase Six: the fracture of the regime; and
Phase Seven: the formation of new national leadership.
The nuke-rattling is a strategy of a gangster regime left to its own devices throughout the '90s, and for which there is now no obvious solution. Iran will become the same problem unless confronted and obliged to abandon its nuclear ambitions.
Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Murtha will find a way to blame Bush and demand hearings into Bush Adminsitration policies, even as the clock ticks down.
UPDATE:
From The Washington Post:
Chinese officials released a statement simultaneously recognizing and condemning the test.
From The New York Times:
In Russia, which shares a short border with North Korea, officials reacted with dismay and condemnation. “Russia absolutely condemns North Korea’s nuclear test,” President Vladimir V. Putin said in televised remarks during a meeting with his senior government ministers.
Appearing with Mr. Putin, the defense minister, Sergei B. Ivanov, said that the Russian military had confirmed the test and estimated its force at somewhere between 5 and 15 kilotons much larger that estimates from South Korea.
From The Telegraph:
The dollar rose sharply against the yen and other Asian currencies this morning as investors sought a traditional safe-haven following North Korea's first nuclear weapons test. Asian stock markets were also hit.
From the "talking points" released by U.S. following the announcement of the 1994 Framework Agreement:
After sixteen months of negotiations, the United States and North Korea have reached an agreement that ends the recent threat of nuclear proliferation in Northeast Asia and provides the basis for more normal relations between North Korea and the rest of the world.
The Arms Control Association's account of the Albright-Kim Jong Il get together in October, 2000:
Concluding an unprecedented visit to Pyongyang on October 24, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright announced that North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il had apparently signaled a willingness to end testing of the Taepo Dong-1 ballistic missile. Albright and Kim met for two days of discussions covering North Korea's missile program, nuclear transparency, normalization of relations, and a possible trip to Pyongyang by President Bill Clinton. Albright is the highest-level U.S. official ever to travel to North Korea and the first U.S. government representative to meet with Kim.
During an October 24 press conference, Albright said she and Kim "discussed the full range of concerns on missiles," including North Korea's indigenous program, its exports to states like Pakistan and Iran, and Kim's reported proposal to Russian President Vladimir Putin to cease missile testing in exchange for foreign launch of North Korean satellites. (See ACT, September 2000.) The United States had cited North Korea's advances in missile technology as the primary rationale for a national missile defense and Pyongyang as the principal exporter of missiles to so-called states of concern.
According to Albright, while attending a celebration of the 55th anniversary of North Korea's communist party, Kim said there would be no more tests of the Taepo Dong-1 missile. When an image of the missile flashed across the stadium, Kim "immediately" turned to her and "quipped that [the 1998 test of the Taepo Dong-1] was the first satellite launch and it would be the last." When asked whether the statement was "an unqualified pledge…not to test missiles," Albright said, "I take what he said on these issues as serious in terms of his desire and ours to move forward to resolve the various questions that continue to exist on the whole range of missile issues."
Albright described her talks with Kim as "serious, constructive, and in-depth" and said that Assistant Secretary of State for Nonproliferation Robert Einhorn will follow up on missile issues with the North Koreans November 1-3 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Since September 1999, North Korea has voluntarily foregone missile testing while talks with the United States proceed, a moratorium that Pyongyang reaffirmed after the United States eased economic sanctions in July. North Korea conducted its only test of the Taepo Dong-1 medium-range ballistic missile in August 1998 in an attempt to put a satellite into orbit. U.S. government officials maintain that the satellite launch was a failure and that the launch was intended to test missile guidance and booster capability.
The groundwork for Albright's trip was laid during an October 9-12 visit to the United States of Vice Marshal Jo Myong Rok, North Korea's second-highest ranking military and civilian official. While in Washington, Jo met with Clinton, Albright, and Secretary of Defense William Cohen. When asked at an October 12 press briefing if Jo had discussed Kim's reported offer to Putin to stop missile launches in exchange for foreign satellite-launch assistance, Ambassador Wendy Sherman, policy coordinator for North Korea, said, "We believe, based on the discussions that we had, that there is validity to this idea."
The Jo visit concluded with the release of an October 12 joint communiqué, which noted that resolution of the missile issue would "make an essential contribution to fundamentally improved relations" and reiterated the two countries' commitment to implementation of the 1994 Agreed Framework, which halted Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program. The statement was also the first announcement that Albright would visit North Korea in order to prepare for a possible visit by Clinton.
Previously, North Korea had made sending a high-level envoy to the United States contingent upon being removed from the State Department's list of states that sponsor terrorism. However, in an apparent concession, North Korean delegates at a September 27-October 2 bilateral meeting in New York proposed that Jo visit the United States, according to Sherman.
During periodic discussions since 1996, the United States has tried to persuade North Korea to end its ballistic missile exports and terminate its indigenous missile development program. The last round of missile talks ended in stalemate in July in Kuala Lumpur, when North Korea demanded $1 billion per year in compensation to make up for lost revenue from exports and reiterated its position that missile development was a sovereign right.
Picture here.
From the hard-left and anti-Bush Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (May/June 2005):
Perhaps the greatest danger of all would be North Korea selling its plutonium, highly enriched uranium, or finished weapons to other countries or terrorists. Its track record with ballistic missiles is not encouraging. It has sold missiles to Iran, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan--lucrative sources of income to the impoverished country. Fissile material and nuclear weapons would be even more lucrative and would have a far larger impact on regional and international security.
Finally, here is The Atlantic Monthly's July/August 2005 "North Korea: The War Game" article on conflict with North Korea. Key graph:
The North Korean situation is also ripe for war-game treatment, because of the extraordinarily difficult military and diplomatic challenges it presents. Iran, considered an urgent national-security priority, is thought to be three to five years away from possessing even a single nuclear device. North Korea is widely believed to have as many as ten already, and to be producing more every year. (It is also the first developing nation thought to be capable of striking the continental United States with a long-range ballistic missile.) And whereas Iraq did not, after all, have weapons of mass destruction, North Korea is believed to have large stockpiles of chemical weapons (mustard gas, sarin, VX nerve agent) and biological weapons (anthrax, botulism, cholera, hemorrhagic fever, plague, smallpox, typhoid, yellow fever). An actual war on the Korean peninsula would almost certainly be the bloodiest America has fought since Vietnam—possibly since World War II. In recent years Pentagon experts have estimated that the first ninety days of such a conflict might produce 300,000 to 500,000 South Korean and American military casualties, along with hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. The damage to South Korea alone would rock the global economy.
UPDATE:
The Real Ugly American has some timely questions.
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