Posted on 12/23/2002 7:20:11 PM PST by Dallas
Desperate efforts began yesterday to head off the growing Korean crisis as Pyongyang and Washington continued to talk up the tension.
The UN has confirmed that North Korea has carried out its threat to remove UN seals and dismantle monitoring cameras at a laboratory used to produce weapons-grade plutonium.
Senator Joseph Biden, the outgoing chair of the Senate foreign relations committee, warned that North Korea's plan to restart a programme for plutonium extraction could allow it to produce bombs "within months".
A spokesman for the Vienna - based International Atomic Energy Agency said: "There isn't any legitimate purpose for the facility other than separating plutonium from spent fuel."
Pyongyang has issued a series of threats, including one to "destroy the earth" if the US resorted to nuclear war against it. South Korea's president, Kim Dae-jung, and the president-elect, Roh Moo-hyun, sought to calm the mood by saying they wanted a peaceful resolution.
While Russia expressed concern at the North's weekend announcement, the deputy foreign minister warned the US not to aggravate the crisis.
But the US state department yesterday rejected Pyongyang's insistence that the crisis can be solved if the US signs a treaty of non-aggression. "We will not bargain or offer inducements for North Korea to live up to the treaties and agreements it has signed," a spokesman said.
US intelligence sources were quoted by the BBC as saying they believe "North Korea may already have a small number of nuclear bombs and the material to make a few more".
Mr Biden said the crisis was "a greater danger immediately to US interests ... than Saddam Hussein."
Yesterday, the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, dismissed such concerns. "We are capable of fighting two major regional conflicts," he said.
"We're capable of winning decisively in one and swiftly defeating in the case of the other, and let there be no doubt about it."
He said Washington chose to pursue a diplomatic strategy against North Korea for the moment, as that crisis was still at a relatively early stage.
The North Korean media, which is never short of a fiery turn of phrase, has given Bush administration hardliners all the material they may want.
The communist party's newspaper Workers' Daily declared that "the army and people of the DPRK are fully ready to mercilessly strike the bulwark of US imperialist aggressors" - implying that they could hit targets in the US.
"There can be no earth without Korea," it said. "The army and people of the DPRK will destroy the earth if the enemies dare make a nuclear strike at it. This is their do-or-die spirit."
Don't forget Las Vegas.
This is just so much bluster from these cretins. Their population would defect en masse if given the chance. The "Dear Leader" is much too fond of his harem and his James Bond movies for them to launch a nuclear attack.
Sorry, a hundred miles is well inside the minimum range of either C-4 or D-5 SLBMs. Gotta back up a ways. Merry Christmas!
The "Axis of Evil" includes Iraq and NK.
Roger that. The Israelis sure had no problem doing exactly that to Iraq in the 1980's.
Our Government should have the balls the Israelis have. Just go in and destroy the thing, tough sh$$t, what are they gonna do about it....?
Same problem here as in 1950: the Chinese won't like the idea of a prosperous, free Korea right next door
That works for me!
Seriously, folks, what in the wide wide world of sports is going on here? How do these guys get off threating to blow up the world? Blow up the world? It feels crazy for me to type it, and I'm not even the leader of a nuclear armed nation. Were any other nation so armed to do so, you'd expect a certain set of canned responses from the world at large. Especially when someone has been so good as to include them all in their lunatic bellicosity. So where is the response?
Where is the outrcry from the U.N.?
Where is the warm 'I feel your pain' embrace of the Democrats?
Where are the throngs of congressional / entertainment truth(?) seekers?
Where is the total capitulation of the French?
The North Koreans have been crying wolf so long, that no one is listening. I wonder how long Armed, Hungry and Crazy can keep screaming 'Stop me before I kill again' while being ignored. It would be funny in a lunatic raving sort of way, except for the ever increasing reach of their missiles.
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