Free Republic

Siegfried Hecker, sitting in a cold conference room, was asked by his North Korean hosts if he would like to see their "product." "Yes," Dr. Hecker replied. "Do you mean plutonium?" Hecker, former director of the U.S. weapons lab at Los Alamos and familiar with the hazardous properties of plutonium, was surprised when two technicians carried a small red metal box into the room. Inside was a white wooden box containing two glass jars -- they looked like marmalade jars -- one containing a piece of plutonium metal, the other plutonium powder. He later asked if he could hold the...

An American destroyer tailed a North Korean ship Tuesday as it sailed along China's coast, U.S. officials said, amid concerns the vessel is carrying illicit arms destined for Myanmar.

WASHINGTON, April 3, 2009 – A potential North Korean test launch of a three-stage missile would have a negative impact on efforts to lessen tensions in the region, a U.S. State Department official told reporters here yesterday. Senior U.S. diplomats have urged North Korea “to desist from launching any type of missile,” spokesman Robert Wood said at a news conference. The North Koreans insist that their Taepodong 2 missile that is expected to be launched in the coming days is carrying a communications satellite for peaceful purposes. North Korea’s neighbors South Korea and Japan are alarmed at the possible launch....

TOKYO (AFP) — A group of Iranian missile experts is in North Korea to help Pyongyang prepare for a rocket launch, Japan's Sankei Shimbun newspaper reported on Sunday. North Korea has said it will launch a communications satellite over northern Japan between April 4 and 8, and the report said the 15-strong Iranian delegation had been in the country since the beginning of this month. It includes senior officials with Iranian rocket and satellite producer Shahid Hemmat Industrial Group, the daily said, quoting unnamed sources.

VIENNA, Austria - Diplomats say that North Korea has made all of its Yongbyon nuclear facilities off limits to international inspectors.

New AF Dress Coat Left Flapping in the Wind It could just be that the Air Force is entering an era that, in part, will be defined by what will not be a hot-button issue: uniforms. "First things first," Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz responded Sept. 17 when asked by Military.com whether uniforms -- new ones or modifications to current dress -- will be relegated to the back burner during his tenure. Schwartz, who had just listened as his major command chiefs offered up a list of things the Air Force needs today-right-now-thank-you-very much -- including new...

NAIROBI, Kenya — U.S. sailors brought injured North Koreans aboard their destroyer for medical treatment after the Koreans were shot and wounded in a battle with pirates off the coast of Somalia, the Navy said Wednesday. The destroyer USS James E. Williams assisted Korean sailors who retook control of their North Korean-flagged vessel Tuesday in a deadly battle with Somali pirates who had hijacked the boat late Monday. Lt. John Gay, deputy spokesman for the U.S. 5th Fleet in Bahrain, told The Associated Press that pirate attacks are not rare in U.S. Navy's area of operations and that "it's our...

MANAMA, Bahrain (NNS) -- The crew of a North Korean cargo vessel, Dai Hong Dan, regained control of their vessel Oct. 30, after fighting with the pirates who had taken over their ship sometime Monday. The crew was able to control the steering and engineering spaces of the ship, while the pirates had seized the bridge. The ship is approximately 60 nautical miles northeast of Mogadishu. Three corpsmen from USS James E. Williams (DDG 95), an Arleigh-Burke-class destroyer operating as part of the maritime coalition, along with a boarding team, provided medical assistance and other support as needed to the...

Saddam's Shadow Africa Energy & Mining June 18, 1997 Copyright 1997 Indigo Publications Africa Energy & Mining June 18, 1997 SECTION: MINING; DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO; N. 207 LENGTH: 787 words HEADLINE: Saddam's Shadow BODY: It's not only diamonds and base metals that interest big mining companies and the latter are not alone in being interested in Katanga. In the delegation that the United States sent to Kinshasa on June 2 under its ambassador to the United Nations, Bill Richardson, the state department's African affairs department was represented by Marc Baas, director for Central Africa. (Susan Rice, director for African...

WASHINGTON, Oct. 26, 2006 – Lost amid all the discussion over North Korea’s Oct. 9 nuclear test is an issue that Defense Department officials who specialize in that region have studied for decades and continue to study now: the possibility that, as it has before, North Korea could launch a conventional “bolt from the blue” attack on South Korea. At 4 a.m. June 25, 1950, a tremendous artillery barrage disturbed the pre-dawn air over the 38th Parallel dividing North and South Korea. Within minutes, 135,000 North Korean soldiers, supported by hundreds of tanks and artillery pieces, poured over the line,...

UNITED NATIONS -- The North Korean government rounds up disabled people and sends them away from the capital Pyongyang to special camps, where they are sorted by their handicap and subjected to "subhuman conditions," a U.N. report released Thursday said. Author Viti Muntarbhorn, special rapporteur for human rights in North Korea, cited reports from defectors who said the mentally disabled are sent to camps known as "Ward 49." Other camps exist for dwarfs, who may marry but are barred from having children. "To date, the situation facing those with disabilities has presented a very disconcerting picture," Muntarbhorn wrote in the...

WASHINGTON, July 7, 2006 – North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has the power to set his country on a more productive course by giving up its nuclear and ballistic missile ambitions, President Bush said today during a news conference at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. "There's a choice for him to make," Bush said. "He can verifiably get rid of his weapons programs and stop testing rockets, and there's a way forward to help his people. The choice is his to make." North Korea, officially known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, is an isolated, repressive...

Democrats may claim victim status for unintended consequences, but at the end of the day, their policies have ultimately produced our current problems with the Axis-of-Evil and their nukes. One only need go back to the Carter administration to reveal the ugly facts. Between World War II and 1979, Iran was the model of progressive Middle Eastern modernity and was undeniably our strongest ally within the Muslim world. However, after Carter’s election, he decided the Shah didn’t measure up to human-rights standards. A leftist mainstream media campaign ran stories of Iranian government-sponsored torture while willfully neglecting to report the Soviet...

SEOUL — A North Korean propaganda film about the repatriation of a spy — Lee In-Mo — who had languished for years in a South Korean prison may have a short shelf life, according to defectors now living in the South. "What we could not believe in the movie was that Lee and others were conducting hunger strikes in the prison," said one defector about the movie. "Refusing to eat was a form of resistance in the South? Boy, South Korea must be a paradise. That's what we said among ourselves" One of the first things South Korean President Kim...

SEOUL (Reuters) - Candy is dandy for North Korean children trying to grow tall, strong and smart in a country battling chronic food shortages. North Korea has developed a candy it claims is good for children and will help them increase their height, weight and IQ, a pro-North Korea newspaper published in Japan said on Friday.. "Unlike medications that help growth by clinical methods or hormonal effects, the growth nutritional candy has no negative side effects," the Choson Sinbo said, based on an interview with the head of a nutritional research center in the North. Unlike sugar-packed and chocolate-covered sweets,...

WASHINGTON and TORONTO — Canadian Maurice Strong agreed to step aside Wednesday as a special envoy for the United Nations, but vowed to clear his name after being linked to Tongsun Park, a Korean lobbyist charged in connection with the Iraq oil-for-food scandal. At the same time, new details emerged about a Calgary oil company in which Mr. Strong and his son, Fred, were major investors during the 1990s together with Mr. Park -- whom the younger Mr. Strong described as "a spooky guy." Shareholders in Cordex Petroleums Inc. also included CSL Group Inc., the holding company owned by Prime...

Text of report in English by South Korean news agency Yonhap Seoul, 30 March: The United States would be forced to take action if it confirms North Korea transferred fissile material to another country, Washington's former top negotiator with Pyongyang said Wednesday [30 March]. "I believe that would be the red line," Robert Gallucci said in an interview with Yonhap news agency. "I believe that if the US had any information that North Korea was transferring fissile material, exporting it, it would have to act to stop it." Gallucci suggested that bilateral negotiations between the US and North Korea should...

HAMBURG, Germany (AFP) - A former North Korean diplomat is accused of ordering material from a German firm that could be used in the production of nuclear weapons, Germany's Der Spiegel reported in its Monday edition. The news magazine said a German businessman would go on trial in Stuttgart, southwest Germany, next month in connection with the case. The diplomat was named by Spiegel as Yun Ho Jin. It said he used to work as a Pyongyang representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. According to Der Spiegel, Yun Ho Jin ordered special aluminium tubes from...

GERMAN prosecutors are questioning the head of a company suspected of trying to export aluminum tubes to North Korea that could be used for making nuclear arms, the Stuttgart prosecutors' office said. The company shipped tubes listing China as the destination without a permit from Germany's Bafa Export Agency, prosecutors' spokesman Eckhard Maak said. The deal was arranged by a North Korean middleman, arousing the suspicion that the real destination was North Korea, he said. "It's a hypothesis right now that North Korea was the final destination," Maak said in an interview. Whether the purchaser was North Korean or Chinese,...

NEW STANDOFF: Pyongyang said yesterday any sanctions imposed on it by Japan would mean a declaration of war and would prompt an `effective physical' reaction AFP , SEOUL Thursday, Dec 16, 2004,Page 5 Advertising Advertising North Korea warned yesterday that it would regard any sanctions imposed on it by Japan as a declaration of war and would hit back with an "effective physical" response. It also said it would reconsider its participation in six-nation talks aimed at ending the nuclear stand-off if a "provocative campaign" under way in Japan against the country continued, a foreign ministry spokesman said. The outburst...