Showing posts with label North Korea. Show all posts
Showing posts with label North Korea. Show all posts

Sunday, September 6, 2015

[OPINION] Nuclear States Do Not Comply with the Non-Proliferation Treaty

Farhang JahanpourFarhang Jahanpour is a former professor and dean of the Faculty of Foreign Languages at the University of Isfahan and a former Senior Research Fellow at Harvard University. He is a tutor in the Department of Continuing Education and a member of Kellogg College, University of Oxford.This is the second of a series of 10 articles in which Jahanpour looks at various aspects and implications of the framework agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme reached in July 2015 between Iran and the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, France, China and Germany, plus the European Union.
OXFORD, Sep 5 2015 (IPS) - Article Six of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) makes it obligatory for nuclear states to get rid of their nuclear weapons as part of a bargain that requires the non-nuclear states not to acquire nuclear weapons. Apart from the NPT provisions, there have been a number of other rulings that have reinforced those requirements.
However, while nuclear states have vigorously pursued a campaign of non-proliferation, they have violated many NPT and other international regulations.
An advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice in 1996 stated: “There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.” Nuclear powers have ignored that opinion.
The nuclear states, especially the United States and Russia, have further violated the Treaty by their efforts to upgrade and diversity their nuclear weapons. The United States has developed the “Reliable Replacement Warhead”, a new type of nuclear warhead to extend the viability of its nuclear arsenal.
The United States and possibly Russia are also developing tactical nuclear warheads with lower yields, which can be used on the battlefield without producing a great deal of radiation. Despite U.S. President Barack Obama’s pledge to reduce and ultimately abolish nuclear weapons, it has emerged that the United States is in the process of developing new categories of nuclear weapons, including B61-12 at a projected cost of 348 billion dollars over the next decade
India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea cannot be regarded as nuclear states. Since Article 9 of the NPT defines Nuclear Weapon States (NWS) as those that had manufactured and tested a nuclear device prior to 1 January 1967, it is not possible for India, Pakistan, Israel or North Korea to be regarded as nuclear weapon states.
“All nuclear powers have continued to strengthen and modernise their nuclear arsenals. While they have been vigorous in punishing, on a selective basis, the countries that were suspected of developing nuclear weapons, they have not lived up to their side of the bargain to get rid of their nuclear weapons”
All those countries are in violation of the NPT, and providing them with nuclear assistance, such as the U.S. agreement with India to supply it with nuclear reactors and advanced nuclear technology, constitutes violations of the Treaty. The same applies to U.S. military cooperation with Israel and Pakistan.
Nuclear states are guilty of proliferation 
Paragraph 14 of the binding U.N. Security Council Resolution 687 that called for the disarmament of Iraq also specified the establishment of a zone free of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in the Middle East.
It was clearly understood by all the countries that joined the U.S.-led coalition to oust Saddam Hussein from Kuwait that after the elimination of Iraqi WMDs, Israel would be required to get rid of its nuclear arsenal. Israel – and by extension the countries that have not implemented that paragraph – have violated that binding resolution. Indeed, both the United States and Israel are believed to maintain nuclear weapons in the region.
During the apartheid era, Israel and South Africa collaborated in manufacturing nuclear weapons, with Israel leading the way. In 2010 itwas reported that “the ‘top secret’ minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries in 1975 show that South Africa’s Defence Minister P.W. Botha asked for nuclear warheads and the then Israeli Defence Minister Shimon Peres responded by offering them ‘in three sizes’.”
The documents were uncovered by an American academic, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in research for a book on the close relationship between the two countries. Israeli officials tried hard to prevent the publication of those documents. In 1977, South Africa signed a pact with Israel that included the manufacturing of at least six nuclear bombs.
The 1995 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review and Extension Conference also called for “the early establishment by regional parties of a Middle East zone free of nuclear and all other WMDs and their delivery systems”. The international community has ignored these resolutions by not pressing Israel to give up its nuclear weapons. Indeed, any call for a nuclear free zone in the Middle East has been opposed by Israel and the United States.
The 2000 NPT Review Conference called on “India, Israel and Pakistan to accede to the Treaty as Non-Nuclear Weapons States (NNWS) promptly and without condition”. States Parties also agreed to “make determined efforts” to achieve universality. Since 2000, little effort has been made to encourage India, Pakistan or Israel to accede as NNWS.
The declaration agreed by the Iranian government and visiting European Union foreign ministers (from Britain, France and Germany) that reached an agreement on Iran’s accession to the Additional Protocol and suspension of its enrichment for more than two years also called for the elimination of weapons of mass destruction throughout the Middle East.
The three foreign ministers made the following commitment: “They will cooperate with Iran to promote security and stability in the region including the establishment of a zone free from weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East in accordance with the objectives of the United Nations.” Twelve years after signing that declaration, the three European countries and the international community have failed to bring about a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction.

Monday, August 24, 2015

[VIDEO] S. Korea slams North over submarine, artillery deployments

Seoul (AFP) - North Korea has mobilised dozens of submarines and doubled its artillery units along the border, South Korea said Sunday, accusing Pyongyang of undermining top-level talks aimed at averting a military confrontation.
A defense ministry spokesman said 70 percent of the North's total submarine fleet -- or around 50 vessels -- had left their bases and disappeared from Seoul's military radar.
The movement of such a large number of submarines was "unprecedented," the spokesman said, adding that Seoul and Washington were beefing up their military surveillance in response.
"The number is nearly 10 times the normal level... we take the situation very seriously," he said.
The North has also doubled the number of artillery units along the heavily-fortified land border with the South, he added.
The move came as top officials from both Koreas resumed a talks aimed at easing military tensions after a marathon negotiating session the night before ended without final agreement.
"The North is adopting a two-faced stance with the talks going on," said the spokesman.
Yonhap news agency, citing military officials, said the submarine deployment was the largest since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.
"No one knows whether the North will attack our warships or commercial vessels... we are mobilising all our surveillance resources to locate them," it quoted one military official as saying.
The North operates more than 70 submarines -- one of the world's largest fleets -- compared to about 10 in the South, according to Seoul's latest defense white paper.
The South accused Pyongyang in 2010 of using a submarine to torpedo a Seoul warship resulting in the loss of 46 lives -- a charge the North denied.
Tension flared on the Korean peninsula after Seoul accused Pyongyang of planting landmines across the border that earlier this month maimed two South Korean soldiers.
Pyongyang denied involvement but Seoul retaliated by resuming loudspeaker propaganda broadcast hated by the North along the border on August 10.
The North's leader Kim Jong-Un last week ordered his military to move to a war-footing after an exchange of artillery fire on Thursday that claimed no casualties but further escalated tension

Saturday, August 22, 2015

[VIDEO] North Korea approves ‘final attack’ on South Korea as tensions increase in region

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un declared his front-line troops were in a "quasi-state of war" Friday and ordered them to prepare for battle, a day after the most serious confrontation with South Korea in years.
A North Korean military official says a meeting of senior party and defense officials led by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un met Thursday night and "reviewed and approved the final attack operation."
He gave no details on what kind of military retaliation North Korea would see as appropriate punishment for South Korea's shelling of its territory Thursday.
It’s the latest challenge in the regional feud. South Korea warned Friday that North Korea was likely to launch "provocations" if Seoul did not meet a Saturday deadline to cease propaganda broadcasts.
Kim Yong Chol, director of the general reconnaissance bureau of the North Korean army, on Friday denied South Korean allegations that Pyongyang has been raising tensions on the peninsula.
He denied the North fired anything across the Demilitarized Zone and says South Korea has not offered conclusive evidence where the rocket was launched in the North, or where exactly it landed in the South.
He suggested human error might have been a factor on the South Korean side and says the South's decision to retaliate with its own barrage was dangerous and rash.
Kim says: "Skirmishes can lead to all-out war."
South Korean Defense Minister Han Min-koo issued a warning at a press conference as a South Korean media outlet reported that Pyongyang appeared to be preparing to test-fire short- and mid-range ballistic missiles.
The report by Yonhap News Agency cited a South Korean government source who said that North Korea seemed to be "weighing the timing of the firing under its strategic intention to increase military tension on the Korean Peninsula to the highest level." The source also said that the apparent preparations for the test had been detected by South Korea's joint radar system, which it shares with the United States.
The North has given Seoul a deadline of 5 p.m. Saturday evening (4 a.m. EDT) to remove border loudspeakers that—after an 11 year lull-- have started broadcasting anti-Pyongyang propaganda. Failure, Pyongyang says, will result in further military action. Seoul has vowed to continue the broadcasts.
Earlier Friday, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un declared his country to be in a "quasi-state of war" and fully ready for any military operations starting Friday evening, according to a report by Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency.
In response, South Korea raised its military readiness to its highest level. Joint Chiefs of Staff spokesman Jeon Ha-kyu told a televised news conference that South Korea is ready to repel any additional provocation.

Saturday, August 8, 2015

North Korea to turn clocks back by 30 minutes to establish own time zone

It is a problem for small states everywhere overshadowed by mighty neighbours. How to stick out? And perhaps assert national pride at the same time?
On Friday North Korea came up with its own typically idiosyncratic answer, announcing that from next week it will use its own unique time zone. Pyongyang said that it will pull back its current standard time by 30 minutes, making it GMT +8.30, rather than GMT +9.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un

The move is a diplomatic salvo aimed squarely at Japan, the country’s former colonial overlord. Local time in North and South Korea and Japan has been the same since Japan’s rule over what was a single Korea between 1910 and 1945.
The North’s official Korean Central News Agency said that the establishment of a sovereign “Pyongyang time” was aimed at what it called rooting out the legacy of the Japanese colonial period.
The new time zone will take effect on 15 August – the 70th anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japanese rule at the end of the second world war.
“The wicked Japanese imperialists committed such unpardonable crimes as depriving Korea of even its standard time while mercilessly trampling down its land with 5,000-year-long history and culture and pursuing the unheard-of policy of obliterating the Korean nation,” the KCNA dispatch said, in classically accusing tones.
North Korea now joins a select club of small, proud nations that have anomalous time zones. It includes the mountain kingdom of Nepal, which at GMT +5.45 is 15 minutes ahead of Delhi, its vast neighbour. Kathmandu adopted Nepal Standard Time in 1956. It has stuck with it, ostensibly in order to balance its sprawling eastern and western halves.

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Three ways Obama and Kim Jong Un are eerily similar

Slide1
I’m not really sure who’s emulating whom, or if it’s just a creepy coincidence, but have you noticed how our own Dear Leader, Barack Obama, shares some eery similarities with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un? We’ve come up with three so far.
1. Very secretive youth.
There seem to be information gaps in both Obama’s and Kim’s formative years.
Apparently no official biography on Kim has ever been released, so the only known information on his early life comes from those who have defected from North Korea or people who have claimed to have seen him abroad. He apparently studied in Switzerland in several schools where he was described as an ambitious student who liked basketball, but his grades and attendance ratings were poor.
Of course we’re well-aware of the question marks surrounding Obama’s younger years, including his druggie days as member of the Choom Gang, the nature of his travel to Pakistan, and most recently, the stinging criticism from a University of Chicago professor who said “the other professors hated him because he was lazy, unqualified, never attended any of the faculty meetings.”
2. Passion for basketball
High school friends of Kim noted that he “worshipped NBA players” and proudly showed off pictures of himself with Toni Kukoc of the Chicago Bulls and Kobe Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakers.
And unless you’ve been living under a rock, you must be well aware of Kim’s much publicized bromance with Dennis Rodman.
Of Obama’s obsession with basketball, the Washington Post said breathlessly, “to say that President Obama loves basketball understates the role of the sport in his life. He has been devoted to the game for 40 years now, ever since the father he did not know and never saw again gave him his first ball during a brief Christmastime visit. Basketball is central to his self identity. It is global yet American-born, much like him. It is where he found a place of comfort, a family, a mode of expression, a connection from his past to his future. With foundation roots in the Kansas of his white forebears, basketball was also the city game, helping him find his way toward blackness, his introduction to an African American culture that was distant to him when he was young yet his by birthright.”
Um, really? I feel a bit queasy right now.
3. Purging the military
We’ve written here on many occasions about how Obama seems to be doing his best to dramatically reduce the might and strength of our military. Estimates of how many officers have been relieved of command since he took office range around the 200 mark with at least nine generals and 157 Air Force majors losing their posts.
Kim also seems intent on purging his top brass, except instead of just firing them, he fires AT them.
We reported recently about the official executed for falling asleep in a meeting.  Hyon Yong-Choi was apparently blasted by an anti-aircraft gun in front of a gallery of observers.
“In the latest cull, the North Korean despot is said to have ordered the death of his vice armed forces minister, So Hong-chan, and several others close to him for not following his orders.” 
So that’s our top three…for now. Please let us know if we’ve left anything on the list.
 

Sunday, November 10, 2013

The Progressive Degradation of Freedom

There are Chinese towns near the border with North Korea that send rice across the Yalu River in exchange for girls to marry.  It makes sense.  North Korea needs rice, because communist farming is a failure.  China needs girls, after thirty years of sex-selective abortion and female infanticide.  And this neat little arrangement in an obscure corner of the East holds an important lesson for what is left of a Western civilization looking down the barrel of a gun of its own aiming: the feeling of self-determination can be reduced to the satisfaction of having a daughter to sell for food. 
As totalitarian dreamers of both the one-party and multi-party varieties have long understood, and have come to count on, humans have an almost infinitely elastic ability to accommodate themselves to conditions that seem inescapable or predetermined.  Our natural desire for self-preservation virtually guarantees it -- there is almost no degradation that men cannot learn to live with, given enough time. 
"Learning to live with it," however, is both a natural reflex and a great danger.  For although self-preservation is not at all the same as acquiescence, the former can devolve into a rationalization of the latter due to the slackening of will and reason that results from battle fatigue and the stretching of the soul's moral cords by' the constant pull of inescapable conditions.  And when this slackening of the soul occurs, men may become bound to oppressive rulers more firmly than could ever be achieved with mere chains and fences.  For what they are losing is a faculty of perception less obviously vital to our bare existence than others, and therefore easier than others to survive without, namely the capacity to feel free. 

Via: American Thinker


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Sunday, October 13, 2013

North Korea warns of 'all-out war' as it refuses to sign pact with US

The country also refused to sign a non-aggression pact that John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, offered last week on condition of denuclearisation.
In a thinly veiled threat to strike the United States, the North's National Defence Commission (NDC), chaired by leader Kim Jong-Un, said the US government must withdraw its policy of hostility against the North if it wants peace on both the Korean peninsula and the "US mainland".
"(The United States) must bear it in mind that reckless provocative acts would meet our retaliatory strikes and lead to an all-out war of justice for a final showdown with the United States," a spokesman of the NDC was quoted as saying in a statement carried by Pyongyang's Korean Central News Agency.
"We emphasise again that the United States must withdraw various measures aimed to isolate and strangulate us. Dependent upon this are... peace and security, not only on the Korean peninsula but the US mainland as well."
The comments come after a two-day joint naval drill between Japan, South Korea and the US, which included an American nuclear aircraft carrier, sparked a series of angry responses and threats from Pyongyang.

Via: The Telegraph

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Monday, January 23, 2012

Support the F-35


With Iran and North Korea continuing to pose a threat in very different parts of the world, the U.S. cannot let down our guard.

Proposals to cut our military are ill-conceived and dangerous.  The F-35 is an important part of defending our country and our allies.  With countries like China and Russia developing their own stealth fighters, we need to keep up production of the Joint Strike Fighter and fend off attempts by Congress and the administration to undermine it.

Do your part and tell your Congressman that you support the F-35 fifth-generation stealth jet - the most advanced multirole aircraft ever designed.  Visit www.f35.com for more information.Support the F-35.


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