Posted on 03/02/2003 6:24:53 AM PST by Indy Pendance
North Korea has accused US intelligence of staging a secret drill for a surprise attack on its nuclear facility and warned that an attack would trigger "horrifying nuclear disasters".
The North's ruling Workers Party newspaper Rodong Sinmun, argued the United States was pushing ahead with "actual military actions that came in accordance with the second Korean war scenario of aggression".
"What merits a serious attention is that a special operation group of the CIA staged a secret drill to make a surprise attack on the nuclear facility of the DPRK (North Korea) and destroy it," it said.
"The US projected attack on the nuclear facility of the DPRK presupposes a nuclear war."
Tensions along the world's last remaining Cold War frontier escalated last week after Washington's announcement that North Korea had restarted a five-megawatt reactor capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium.
The newspaper said its armed forces were ready to "mercilessly wipe out" a war of aggression.
"If the US imperialists ignite a war on the Korean peninsula, the war will turn into a nuclear war," it said.
"As a consequence, the Koreans in the North and South and the people in Asia and the rest of the world will suffer horrifying nuclear disasters."
US
US Joint Chief of Staff Chairman Richard Myers told NBC last week that if President George W Bush decides to use military force to resolve special issues, US troops are ready to operate in a flexible and effective manner.
Mr Myers reportedly said the United States maintains and updates all military options, including pre-emptive nuclear attacks, against North Korea.
However, Yonhap news agency said the Seoul government dismissed talk of a US plan to attack North Korea as "not true".
"The US side told us that the talk of launching a preemptive strike against the North is not true," an unnamed government official here was quoted as saying.
"We've heard from the US Government that Myers was referring to the general principle that the military has always had contingency plans when he talked about attacking the North," he said.
In a speech on Saturday local time, new South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun warned of "horrible consequences" unless the nuclear stand-off was resolved peacefully.
"We would be unable to cope with the horrible consequences should peace on the Korean Peninsula be broken for whatever reasons," he said.
Eight years ago, the Korean Peninsula was on the brink of war over a possible US attack on North Korea's nuclear facility at Yongbyon, some 90 kilometres north of Pyongyang.
North Korea resolved the 1994 crisis by agreeing to freeze the Yongbyon complex under a deal, known as the Agreed Framework.
The deal collapsed amid a new crisis sparked last October when Washington said North Korea had admitted running a separate nuclear programme based on enriched uranium.
Fears are now centred on the 8,000 spent fuel rods stored at Yongbyon as reprocessing them could yield enough plutonium for half a dozen bombs.
US newspaper The New York Times reported experts and intelligence officials had told US President George W Bush they expected the North would reactivate its reprocessing plant in the next few weeks.
This from the guy who threatened to "blow up the world"
?
Whatever.
I know it's not going to happen, but in a comic book world, it would be great to just flat call his bluff.
Dubya could go on TV and simply state: "Well, Kim Jong is either suicidal, or a coward.. We're just waiting to see which."
I am simply floored that Kim Jong would break the deal, build nukes in the basement, get mad when we catch him & threaten us, threaten the world, threaten to test a three stage missle that would leave the entire western half of the continent open to attack AND THEN whine about "..an attack would trigger horrifying nuclear disasters"
Well, what did you expect Kim? The welcome wagon?
This whole situation has simply reached a point where it's no longer worthy of a thoughtful response.
Just nuke them. Or get Japan to attack him for us (as they have threatened) and then run to us for cover..
"If the US imperialists ignite a war on the Korean peninsula, the war will turn into a nuclear war," it said.
Ok, so now he says he has nukes and is going to use them on us. Shall we play quick draw? Say drop a grid pattern of tactical nukes on the entire northern part of Korea?
Why wait till he fires? If it is going nuke, so be it. The first with the best wins, I have no desire to wait till a million Americans die before we nuke his ugly arse. He has threatened America with nuclear weapons, the only thing left is to pull the trigger.
Just curious. Were you happy or saddened by the destrucion of the World Trade Centers.
Not only that, but he might have a couple of crude ballistic missiles. Our ICBMs are so accurate that it's silly, wheras he would be lucky to get even on across the pacific and onto the west coast, to say nothing of actually hitting the city he was aiming at. That's a real dumb risk when you consider that the response will blow your country off the map and into the history books.
Jimmy Carter was interviewed on NPR's Morning Edition, I believe last Tuesday, and said, among other things, that we needed to negotiate with North Korea as he did back in 93.
I was screaming at the radio for Bob Edwards to ask President Carter what good more negotiations would do, since the North Koreans broke the agreement Carter had negotiated with them, but of course he didn't ask that question.....
There comes a point where you have to either walk the walk or shut up. North Korea is doing their level best to provoke an incident but we're not biting. This is exactly the right course of action. They want to draw us into a confrontation but are getting angry because we are not responding to their provocations and it is driving them nuts. There is only so far they can go with this trash talk.
Time is on our side, not theirs. They have no food, money or resources and are getting really desperate. Let them dangle in the breeze for a little longer and enjoy their communist utopia.
"When Washington said that North Korea had admitted..." The North Koreans admitted it then and have reaffirmed it over and over again since then. By attributing the report to "Washington," ABC News suggests that the Korean nuke threat is nothing more than an inside the beltway rumor or perhaps a Bush orchestated disinformation campaign. No liberal bias there. None, I tell you. None.
To advocate the destruction of an entire city because it contains a small population of nut cases is as illogical and stupid as suggesting that an entire country should be nuked because the leadership is despotic and lunatic.
What do you think the economic and human ramifications would be if such an event happended? The Dow? Cut it by at least 75%. The world insurance industry? Goodbye. The deaths of possibly 500,000 people? This is not stuff where arm chair quarterbacks sit on their ass and flippantly say "nuke them."
NK is an important lesson for the US that we should attack Iraq so nuclear blackmail cannot happen in the future. But, we need to calmly fix this problem before Kim and his loony friends make war. Remember, if a nuclear war happens, Kim and henchmen will be dead. They may be the lucky ones.
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