North Korea intends to build more nuclear reactors; everybody else unhappy.
The North announced on Tuesday its intention to build the light-water reactors and threatened to resume work on two graphite-moderated reactors, which could produce large amounts of material for atomic bombs.
In Washington, the U.S. State Department has made clear that any reactor construction would break commitments North Korea made at the talks among the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.
Do you know how difficult it is to get these six countries to agree on anything? Well, it doesn't seem important to N. Korea (meaning Kim Jong-Il) to please anybody else, so he's continuing work on his nuclear reactors. Oh, well, call it par for the course.
Near the end of the article, this quote occurs
The next round of the six-party talks is likely to take place in January, according to sources familiar with the discussions. But there is doubt about whether North Korea will participate, partly because of Pyongyang's anger over a U.N. vote to condemn it for human rights abuses and a U.S. crackdown on its finances.
I'm not sure, but the "U.S. crackdown on its finances" may have something to do with N. Korea forging and distributing bogus U.S. $100 bills. (I know the article is the Washington Times, but I only use it because it's succinct.) Also read this article.
Last but not least, N. Korea is lifting the ban on cell-phones...except they're building a system to block any calls to outside N. Korea.
At the same time, N. Korea is also going to refuse foreign food aid.
One analysis of this action that I think is likely is this:
In the eyes of North Korea, nongovernmental organizations are subversive, trying to undermine their system," said Shi Yinhong, a professor with People's University in Beijing. "It's also revenge against U.S. accusations that North Korea is engaged in counterfeiting, smuggling and drug trafficking. To toss out the NGOs is perhaps the only measure it can take other than condemning Washington.
In other words, N. Korea will hurt its own people in secret rather than take help but have to listen our jibber-jabber about human rights.
4 comments:
Damnit! I finally blog and you go and do the same...
I predict the PRK system will collapse eventually. Isolationism does not seem to work very well in the modern world. I personally don't care if they have nuclear-anything; it doesn't make me feel threatened at all.
Nuclear weapons are not really practical for use outside of waving them around in the air and saying "Look what we have!"
I'm a little concerned that they have nukes. They don't (yet) have a missile system that can reach us, and in all practically they could never use them without knowing it would be the death of their regime (and probably the Dear Leader's personal death as well) but in a regime so strange, so disconnected from the rest of the world, that the normal restraints against the use of nuclear weapon are considerably weaker against them. Besides, North Korea nuking Japan would be nearly as disastrous for us as if they nuked us personally.
Yes, you shouldn't underestimate the irrationality of Kim Jong-Il. If he had nukes he might think he could use them and get away with it.
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