http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080826/ap_on_re_as/koreas_nuclear

Quote :

" NKorea suspends nuclear reactor disablement By JAE-SOON CHANG, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 27 minutes ago SEOUL, South Korea - North Korea said Tuesday it has suspended work to disable its nuclear reactor in anger over Washington's failure to remove it from the U.S. list of terror sponsors. The North said it will soon consider a step to restore the plutonium-producing facility. The announcement poses the biggest hurdle yet to the communist nation's denuclearization process under a landmark deal last year. "The U.S. postponed the process of delisting the (North) as a 'state sponsor of terrorism,'" the Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency. "Now that the U.S. breached the agreed points, the (North) is compelled to take" countermeasures, it said. The Foreign Ministry also said the government will "consider soon a step to restore" the nuclear facility at Yongbyon, but it did not elaborate. The disablement was suspended as of Aug. 14, it added. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said North Korea still has obligations to fulfill. "The work ahead is to get that verification mechanism and therefore to proceed with denuclearization," she said during a news conference in Ramallah, West Bank. "We actually are in discussions with the North Koreans and I think we'll just see where we come out in a few weeks." The U.S. offered to remove North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism as one of the key concessions in exchange for the North shutting down and disabling the nuclear reactor under a deal reached last year in six-party negotiations that include China, Japan, the two Koreas, the U.S. and Russia. In June, the U.S. said it would remove North Korea from the list after it turned in a long-delayed account of its nuclear programs and blew up the reactor's cooling tower in a symbolic move to demonstrate its commitment to disarm. North Korea began disabling the plutonium-producing facilities in November but the North slowed the work in a dispute with Washington over how to verify a declaration of its nuclear programs. The two sides have been negotiating on that issue with Washington insisting it would remove the North from the terror list only after it agrees to a verification plan. That has angered North Korea. The North's statement came shortly after Chinese President Hu Jintao left South Korea where he held talks with President Lee Myung-bak on the North Korean nuclear issue among other topics. South Korean and Japanese officials lamented the North's move. "It's regrettable that this announcement came at a time when each side has been trying" to move the process forward, said Kim Sook, Seoul's chief nuclear envoy. "I hope North Korea will resume disablement measures at an early date." Japan said it was worried by the development. "We take it with grave concern," Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman Kazuo Kodama told a news conference in Tokyo. The North's state media have issued a series of commentaries blasting the U.S. and the Foreign Ministry last week threatened that the country would bolster its "war deterrent" — a euphemism for its nuclear programs — as it condemned U.S.-South Korea military exercises. Last week, the state news agency KCNA also lashed out at Bush, accusing him of blocking progress at the nuclear talks by raising the issue of human rights in the North. During a trip to Seoul earlier this month, Bush publicly criticized the North's human rights record. Analysts were divided over the North's ultimate aims. Yang Moo-jin, a professor at Seoul's University of North Korean Studies, called Tuesday's statement very serious. "I think this represents the biggest crisis to the denuclearization process since the Feb. 13 agreement," Yang said, referring to last year's disarmament-for-aid deal. "The North's Kim Jong Il may have decided that he won't negotiate with the Bush administration any more" unless Washington takes the North off the terror list first, he said. Bush is set to leave office in January after U.S. presidential elections in November. But Cheong Seong-chang, a North Korea expert at the private Sejong Institute in South Korea, said the latest statement appeared to be aimed at pressuring Washington to lower its demands regarding verification and remove the North from the terror list. South Korean and U.S. officials have said eight of the 11 disablement measures have been finished and that when the entire disablement is completed, it would take at least a year for the North to restart the facilities. Whang Joo-ho, a nuclear expert at South Korea's Kyung Hee University, said it would take about three to six months for North Korea to restore its nuclear facilities at Yongbyon. He said it would take only one month to rebuild the kind of cooling tower the North destroyed in June. "

I dont even know why we try to deal with these people...they are all the time saying one thing and then do something different later

8/26/2008 11:20:09 AM

I think if we just talked to them more and possibly a UN sanction, this could have been avoided.

8/26/2008 11:58:46 AM

SUPPLIES!!!

8/26/2008 6:08:07 PM

They could just buy what they need from Russia.

8/26/2008 6:15:31 PM

fuck

just send a plane over there and blow that shit up

its not like we give a damn about other nations sovereignty anyway

8/26/2008 6:31:06 PM

Fuckin N. Korea let's git-er-dun and takem over; those commies in Russina too. We'll show em USA #1

8/26/2008 6:36:50 PM

^^

8/26/2008 7:44:52 PM

Dont worry, Obama will sit down and talk to the N Koreans and Iranians and all will be ok

8/26/2008 8:03:39 PM

lol, please...like obama is gonna get elected with all the white rural folk in this country

8/26/2008 8:13:56 PM

Obama, Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong-il, and Putin can go into a room and hug it out.

8/26/2008 8:16:35 PM

i bet in a fight obama would beat all of them...putin would be the toughest

[Edited on August 26, 2008 at 8:19 PM. Reason : as opposed to mccain who'd get his ass kicked]

8/26/2008 8:19:44 PM

shut up

8/26/2008 8:23:00 PM

dont hate just cuz u hate blk ppl

8/26/2008 8:28:06 PM

Putin will pulverize everyone.

8/26/2008 8:58:00 PM

Yeah my money would be on Putin in that fight.

8/26/2008 9:02:39 PM

idk...putin knows judo, but obama is half black...

8/26/2008 9:06:53 PM

They could settle it on the court.

8/27/2008 7:21:47 AM

Quote :

"Yeah my money would be on Putin in that fight."

What world leader would he not win against? Out of the world's PMs and presidents, not many of them are certified bad asses.

If I had to pick someone to go up against Putin, it would be fucking Mugabe.

Those motherfuckers would tear you apart limb by limb.

8/27/2008 8:57:58 AM

North Korea: "We know that you've only got a few months left in office, so we're just going to stall until we can get a new American President to play with."

Quote :

"just send a plane over there and blow that shit up"

But if we do that, then North Korea will blow up South Korea and then where am I going to get a new Samsung phone and LCD from?

8/27/2008 9:47:20 AM

yeah, N Korea cant touch us, but they can sure wreak havoc on S. Korea and even Japan.

then china gets involved, and the whole side of the plant goes nuts.

it would not be good. it would, in fact, be bad.

8/27/2008 10:50:03 AM

Putin would fuck Obamas pretty boy ass up in a fight....he will break him

8/27/2008 12:52:29 PM

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080919/ap_on_re_as/as_koreas_nuclear;_ylt=AgOOHppuyXFmKGqfm4XPFkFvaA8F

lol

9/19/2008 1:27:07 AM

Quote :

"I dont even know why we try to deal with these people...they are all the time saying one thing and then do something different later"

Maybe we try to deal with them because you have also managed to perfectly describe the actions of most American politicians... I mean, granted, they tend towards having a leadership whose sanity can be called into question, and they do things that border on threatening to the western world, but still, politicians are politicians.

[Edited on September 19, 2008 at 1:31 AM. Reason : .]

9/19/2008 1:31:13 AM

thats probably my favorite obama pic...i like anybody who can ball on hansbrough, or at least appears to in a picture

also maybe they are actually stopping the program since kim jong il is supposedly dead

[Edited on September 19, 2008 at 1:48 AM. Reason : .]

9/19/2008 1:35:24 AM

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081011/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_koreas_nuclear;_ylt=Ao1o0hbUEChQIfcHe2qVg_JvaA8F

off the terror list after agreeing to verification program...wonder how long that lasts

10/11/2008 4:04:56 PM

Quote :

"[sarcastically]I think if we just talked to them more and possibly a UN sanction, this could have been avoided."

Yea...

Oh wait.

[Edited on October 11, 2008 at 9:13 PM. Reason : ]

10/11/2008 9:12:48 PM

The way we keep making deals with the North Koreans is like if someone bought a set of speakers from the white van guys, and then when they didn't work went and bought another set, and repeated this about 15 times.

10/12/2008 12:23:30 PM

the us should just threaten to blow up any suspected nuclear facility based on satellite reconnaissance

10/12/2008 12:31:25 PM

I haven't been following NK so closely, but I am truly a little puzzled why we're so gentle with them vs. Iran or how we were with Iraq.

It really makes Bush's and the right's prattling about terrorists, evil, and security seem ridiculous to me.

10/12/2008 12:33:24 PM

10/12/2008 2:24:23 PM

Quote :

"Putin would fuck Obamas pretty boy ass up in a fight....he will break him"

please

putin would slay an entire caged ring full of W, cheney, obama, biden, mccain and palin

10/12/2008 2:28:09 PM

^^^ it's really simple. they are about 2.5 miles away from South Korea. With millions of troops just waiting for a reason to strike. We won't do shit against them, especially with big-boy China sitting there, right behind them.

10/12/2008 9:02:35 PM

Quote :

"I haven't been following NK so closely, but I am truly a little puzzled why we're so gentle with them vs. Iran or how we were with Iraq."

aaronburro is correct, but he doesn't paint the picture vividly enough. Seoul, one of the world's most heavily concentrated cities and home to 14 million people (about 1/3 of South Korea's population) is within artillery range of North Korea. You have about three quarters of North Korea's 1.1 million man army forward deployed against the DMZ in mountainous terrain on a hair trigger. You have hundreds of thousands of heavily armed South Koreans forward deployed up against the communists, all on a hair trigger. They say that in the event of a North Korean invasion, the average life span of a soldier on the border during the opening stages will probably be about 30 seconds.

Now, throw in the fact that the United States has about 30k soldiers in South Korea, North Korea happens to border both China and Russia (and the PRC happened to cut its teeth on fighting the US over North Korea), and Japan is within missile range of North Korea. So essentially, you have the first, second, third, and tenth largest economies and the first, second, forth, fifth, and sixth largest militaries all lined up against what has been and could easily be again one of the bloodiest theaters in modern warfare.

Throw in the fact that these aren't podunk second rate militaries but some of the best trained and most heavily equipped forces on the planet. The North Koreans run their soldiers through boot camps that would be called gulags in other nations. The South Koreans earned their reputation for military prowess regularly ambushing the VC in the jungles of Vietnam. Both sides have spent the last sixty years drafting their battle plans and building their militaries around this one scenario.

And of course, North Korea is led by one of the most desperate, isolated, and paranoid governments on the planet that pretty much has nothing to lose.

Bombing North Korea could escalate things. Escalating things in a theater this heavily armed could lead to very bad things very quickly. As important as Iran is, there's almost nothing they could do to create the sort of nightmare military scenario that the North Koreans could create in five minutes on the whim of the Dear Leader. War with North Korea would be an old school, industrialized warfare bloodfest that would probably make Iraq and Afghanistan combined look like a picnic.

Thus, the US government as a whole steps more carefully around the North Koreans versus the Iranians.

[Edited on October 13, 2008 at 1:33 AM. Reason : .]

10/13/2008 1:31:09 AM

^ Shit I didn't know it was that bad. Good thing I'm not actually in Kor....oh shit.

[Edited on October 13, 2008 at 8:08 AM. Reason : a]

10/13/2008 8:08:40 AM

Word on the street is that Kim Jong Il is either sick or dead. He hasn't been seen in public in a while. His son was seen meeting a top neurosurgeon in France a few weeks back.

Pyongyang released this laughable photochop on Wednesday to try to dispel rumors:

11/7/2008 12:27:59 PM

haha wow

[Edited on November 7, 2008 at 12:32 PM. Reason : black line is like "oh shit" what were they thinking]

11/7/2008 12:32:29 PM