Posted on 01/02/2004 1:11:59 AM PST by Conservative_Nationalist
N. Korea to Let U.S. Experts See Nuke Site 2 minutes ago
BY SANG-HUN CHOE, Associated Press Writer
SEOUL, South Korea - North Korea (news - web sites) has agreed to allow a U.S. delegation to visit its main nuclear complex next week, a South Korean official said Friday.
The trip would mark the first time outsiders have been allowed to inspect North Korea's main nuclear facilities at Yongbyon, north of Pyongyang, since the communist country expelled U.N. nuclear monitors in late 2002.
USA Today first reported Friday that Washington approved the trip and it was scheduled for Jan. 6-10. The newspaper said the U.S. delegation would include Sig Hecker, director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1985 to 1997. The laboratory produced the first U.S. nuclear bomb.
"The report is true," an official at the South Korean Foreign Ministry said. "The U.S. side has informed us of the trip."
USA Today said the delegation also included a China expert from Stanford University, two Senate foreign policy aides who have previously visited Pyongyang and a former State Department official who has negotiated with North Korea.
Jason Rebholz, a spokesman of the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, said he had no information on the trip and could not comment on the news report.
North Korea is believed to be running a nuclear weapons program at Yongbyon. The United States is trying to persuade the North to give up its nuclear program in return for aid and better ties with the outside world.
I know he believes this but I think he's wrong. I believe his regime is in more danger if it keeps it's nukes than it would be if it gave them up.
I'm afraid that Kim is entirely correct. This is the core of our problem, and why the North Korean problem has defied resolution. Kim cannot fix his country, even if he wanted to. He needs tribute from his neighbors in order to feed his people. Since one cannot demand tribute except from a position of strength, Kim needs a real big stick.
Their once formidable conventional threat is now a rusted out joke. North Korea fields a larger military than they can afford, and the quality suffers badly for it. Forty year old tanks with a quarter tank of gas each are not credible threats to anyone in Kim's neighborhood. A conventional war would lead to carnage for the South and utter defeat for the North.
Kim is stuck. He has to deliver, if only to keep himself in power. When his people starve in large numbers it threatens his pool of manpower, and he runs the risk of collapse. The last ten years have brought North Korea into new lows of misery, they won't survive another ten more like this. Kim is running out of time, but sees that nuclear weapons are a great way to get people to listen to his demands. He truly has no other way out.
He cannot make peace. Fear of foreign threats gives his people purpose and focus. It explains why they are miserable, and why they suffer. He cannot make war. The only result of aggression is total defeat. What he can make are threats, veiled or overt, and use fear as a bargaining tool. Any conflict with North Korea could kill millions and lay waste to entire cities; the temptation to pay Kim off is clear and understandable.
His neighbors understand that he has no options, and that he is a desperate man in a tight corner. Once you realize that Kim has no options that will allow him to keep his head attached to his neck, and that his life is the only one he cares about, you'll understand his assessment of the situation, which is, simply put, "The risk of having nuclear weapons is far less than the risk of being unarmed."
This is not "big".
They will pull a "bait and switch" just as they did to the Clinton state team that went up there in the mid 1990s, being shown only a showcase area, and being kept away from the real action about five kilometers away.
Let's all grow up this morning and not kid ourselves!
No siree, NO champagne here, and I for one won't let the Bush relection 2004 bandwagon sweep me into a mindset of euphoria over this. This is EXACTLY how they co-opted the Clintonites. It is still time for military, intelligence and diplomacy in our dealings with North Korea.
I would say it again to all: NO 2004 PARTISAN RE-ELECTION POLITICS AND NAIVE WESTERN, JUDEO CHRISTIAN SUPER OPTIMISM ABOUT ANY MOVES BY THE CURRENT KWP REGIME IN PYONGYANG!
People MUST slow down and realize how this beast actually works!!!
Ahh...just in time for the 04 elections.
Crank up ole Jimmy and send him back to pull our chesnuts 'outta de fire'.
Rest assured it will be anti-Bush and pro-China.
Sig Hecker and Stephen Younger came up with the idea to share nuke simulation codes with China in the 1990's. William Perry and the Clinton administration agreed with them and they began this sharing scheme to make the world safer (sarcasm).
There seems to be a mistaken impression that this is an administration visit.
Alamo Girl's Clinton Rougue Gallery has some stuff on Hecker, this page
And the same people associated with the Clinton years and China are involved.
Maybe Hecker is planning to share classified codes with N. Korea.
I'm not sure (in honest ignorance) that this is entirely clear or obvious. How much is really publicly known about the structure of KJI's regime? Has, for instance, he regularly purged the military and ruling councils like Saddam did, and been able to reply principly on trusted family members (isn't he a bachelor?) or are there permanent cabals that he's dependent on and may have to answer to in some circumstances? Not that a military dictatorship would be that much of an improvement (or even would fully qualify as a "regime fall") but I wouldn't be so sure that a bloodless coup couldn't happen.
Much of what we know about Kim's regime comes from defectors, some of what we know comes from other sources. First off, North Korea is not a typical military dictatorship. It's more of a cult. Kim Jong Il is quite literally believed to be a deity who wields divine power. North Koreans understand that his word is law, and his power is absolute.
Also, these people have no outside information. Most believe that the world is a wasteland that covets the wealth of North Korea. Americans are actually devils who destroyed South Korea and transformed their people into demonic slaves. Kim Jong Il, the great general, born on a sacred mountain under a host of angels, is the only thing standing between North Korea and the legions of hell.
(No, he didn't actually rip that off from the DNC.)
As far as trust goes, Kim is a severe paranoid and an adherent of the Joesef Stalin's brand of 'purge early, purge often.' In North Korea, when you are suspected of insufficient loyalty, you will either be shot, or jailed. Either way, three generations of your family will be sent to the gulags for your failure.
While he may use a number of people, he doesn't need any of them per se. From every indication we have, he is every bit as powerful as his father was. Raised from birth to be a superior being, he does not view other human life as significant. He expects total unquestioning loyalty from his Koreans, yet would kill any or all of them if it suited his needs. What's worse, he feels that this is the natural order of things, a condition he is entitled to by birth. He has no puppet masters, not the Korean elites, nor the Chinese.
This makes killing him a dicey proposition. Transferring power was hard enough from father to son, but it made sense viewed through a cultlike lens. Killing off their diety won't go over well, and a military dictatorship would likely be fractured and crippled from inception. You can't plan a coup in a nation like this; if you have any power at all, you will be tested from time to time with false offers to join a secret plot to overthrow the government. The price for answering incorrectly is high.
North Korea's sanity is held together by a shoestring named Kim Jong Il. If he is overthrown, the country will likely go from stable to civil war to anarchy in about a week. The elites know that if the regime falls, they and their families will become street lamp decorations at the hands of rampaging mobs. Kim knows this, and plays this dangerous game against potential domestic enemies that could seek to remove him. 'You can't kill me without killing yourself' is a powerful defense, one that I don't see a feasible solution to.
Does N.Korea this Bush is stupid enough to send Jimmah Cartier back there to inspect its little ole power plant(s).
North Korea is a giant fortress of underground tunnels, cave complexes and military hideouts. We could target his Taepo dong ICBMs easily enough, but he still would have any number of Nodongs and SCUD vairants that he could use against the locals. Taking out all delivery systems would require a massive highly sophisticated air campaign that would look exactly like the start of an invasion.
I know we would be taking a chance on starting an all out war but I don't know if North Korea really wants that.
North Korea doesn't want a war, but they want to lose power even less. If we push them to the brink of losing power, they'll make sure that everyone pays for it.
If we destroyed there nukes and they attacked South Korea it would be eventual suicide for them. If they didn't retaliate then they could probably keep their power. What do you guys think their reaction would be to a massive air assault that destroyed their Nukes and capability to make new ones?
You're talking about a huge gamble here, potentially with the lives of millions of people. A massive air campaign against North Korea may trigger an immediate artillery and ballistic missile / WMD response against South Korea, Japan and possibly China, depending on the circumstances.
You can imagine how the world will react to that.
Pinpoint strikes with a few planes against a few targets would require solid gold intelligence. If we hit, we hit, if we don't, they MAY choose to play the incident down, but given our obvious targets, they may feel that it's use it or lose it time. It's unlikely they'd just sit still for us, or they'd be encouraging more of the same.
Now, a decapitation strike against Kim Jong Il runs the same risks. If we miss him, we're screwed. He'll assume that his time has come, and we'll just keep coming for him until he's dead.
If we hit him, there's a decent chance, maybe one in four, that North Korea will fall over dead. The remaining elites could grab the mike, and tell the world that they never liked Kim anyway, and for immunity and immediate sanctuary they'd be willing to surrender. North Korea is a nation of survivors, and I'm sure that their elites have given thought to any number of 'what ifs' like this. Formal capitulation is a possibility.
What is most likely is that North Korea would emit a loud creaking noise, and implode. Once word spread that Kim's balcony at the military parade blew up in a bright ball of shock and awe, and that no one knew what to do, the entire place would fall apart. Kim's loyalist fanatics may launch WMD anyway, and there may be sporadic conventional attacks, but anything more coordinated than that would fail to materialize.
There's a smaller chance, maybe one in four, that it would trigger a full scale invasion. The elites would assume that they had no way out, and for any number of desperate reasons, send the troops south.
Anyway, as bad as these options sound, I fear that history may prove that they would have been the smart way to go.
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