North Korea threatens to attack US! (Using ICBM to hit US West Coast!)

North Korea would launch a ballistic missile attack on the United States if Washington made a pre-emptive strike against the communist state's nuclear plant, the man described as Pyongyang's "unofficial spokesman" said yesterday.

Kim Myong-chol, who has links to the Stalinist regime, told foreign reporters in Tokyo that a US strike on the nuclear plant at Yongbyon "means nuclear war".

"If American forces carry out a pre-emptive strike on the Yongbyon facility, North Korea will immediately target, carry the war to the US mainland," he said, claiming that New York, Washington and Chicago would be "aflame".

A pre-emptive US strike on Yongbyon is one of the strategic scenarios in the crisis over North Korea's nuclear arms program. The US has deployed 24 long-range bombers to the Pacific base of Guam capable of launching such a strike.

Mr Kim, who has written a text studied by North Korean military and political leaders, predicted that Pyongyang would restart a reprocessing plant to make weapons-grade plutonium this month.

A nuclear weapon would be produced by the end of April, with another five produced by the end of the year. This was on top of a suspected nuclear arsenal of 100 weapons.

The ultimate aim of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il was the "neutralisation of the American factor" in the region, Mr Kim said.

This would be achieved by striking a non-aggression pact with the US, or becoming an official nuclear power, thereby making the US nuclear umbrella in the region irrelevant. "Both ways, Kim Jong-il is a winner," he said.

"By the end of the year, I predict Bush will be in Pyongyang suing for peace," he said.

While his comments are extreme, they match the heated and belligerent rhetoric of North Korea, which has previously warned of nuclear war and turning the cities of its enemies into a "sea of ashes".

The Bush Administration yesterday made renewed calls on China and other countries in the region to help broker a solution to the crisis.

In a televised news conference, Mr Bush said North Korea's nuclear arms program was a regional issue. "I say regional because there's a lot of countries that have got a direct stake into whether or not North Korea has nuclear weapons," Mr Bush said.

"China clearly has a stake as to whether or not North Korea has a nuclear weapon."

The Bush Administration is pushing for multilateral talks with North Korea, while Pyongyang wants direct talks with Washington.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell told a US Senate committee: "We have a number of diplomatic initiatives under way, some of them very, very quietly under way, to see if we cannot get a multilateral dialogue started."

Yesterday, the US also flagged the possible withdrawal of its 37,000 troops from South Korea, part of the rethink of a deployment in place since the end of the Korean War in 1953.

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the US was consulting South Korea and he suspected "we'll end up making some adjustments there".

"Whether the forces come home or whether they will move further south of the (Korean) peninsula or whether to some neighbouring area are the kinds of things that are being sorted out," he said at a meeting in Germany.

This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/03/07/1046826530206.html

Pyongyang's uranium-enrichment programme is not far behind its plutonium one, says top official

WASHINGTON - North Korea could produce highly enriched uranium as fuel for nuclear weapons in months not years - much earlier than many have predicted, US Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly has said.

Policy on talks 'illogical' SOUTH Korean Foreign Minister Yoon Young Kwan has described Pyongyang's objections to multilateral talks as ''illogical''.

He said the eventual solution of the nuclear crisis would involve economic aid for the impoverished country from Russia, China, Japan and South Korea as well as the US.

''It's illogical to exclude the potential aid providers from the talks,'' he said.

The uranium programme is the second of two nuclear programmes that Washington says North Korea can use to create weapons. But it was largely believed to be underdeveloped compared to the first programme, which used plutonium.

Washington says the plutonium project is already capable of yielding enough weapons-grade plutonium to build six to eight nuclear bombs within months.

In a new warning about the uranium programme, Mr Kelly said it also was well on its way.

'It is only probably a matter of months, and not years, behind the plutonium,' he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington on Wednesday.

That means the reclusive communist state could get nuclear weapons capability in the short term from both its uranium and plutonium programmes.

Despite this apparent threat, he reaffirmed the Bush administration's determination to engage Pyongyang in a comprehensive resolution of the crisis only in a multilateral forum, rather than bilateral talks as the North has demanded.

A recent congressional report had predicted the North's highly-enriched uranium programme could not produce significant amounts of fissile materials for 'several years'.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, quoting the CIA, said the programme would not produce enough fuel for one or two bombs until 2005.

The US has been aware of Pyongyang's plutonium programme, centred on a nuclear complex at Yongbyon, since the early 1990s. It was frozen under a 1994 accord with Washington.

The uranium enrichment programme was revealed only last October when US officials confronted the North Koreans with secret intelligence.

Since then, Pyongyang has adopted a confrontational approach. It declared its intention to resume nuclear activities, expelled UN monitors, withdrew from a key nuclear treaty, restarted a research reactor and intercepted a US spy plane.

It also made preparations to begin reprocessing spent nuclear fuel, which would set the North on the road to full production of nuclear weapons.

But so far there is no evidence the reprocessing plant has begun operating but it would be a serious move and the US has not taken the military option off the table, said Mr Kelly, the State Department's top Asia-Pacific policymaker.

With the dispute dragging on, South Korean Foreign Minister Yoon Young Kwan yesterday criticised Pyongyang's objections to multilateral talks as 'illogical'.

He told South Korea's MBC radio that the eventual solution of the nuclear crisis would involve economic aid for the impoverished country, inevitably from Russia, China, Japan and South Korea as well as the US.

'It's illogical to exclude the potential aid providers from the talks,' he said. --Reuters, AP

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