Kang Chol-Hwan on the Dangers of Nuke-centric Policy

From The Chosun Ilbo:

The strongest prop of the North Korean regime is concentration camps. These are less like Stalin's Siberian gulags or Mao Zedong's Laogai concentration camps than Hitler's Auschwitz. After World War II, humanity promised never again to permit such camps on earth, and the world community intervenes in crimes against humanity across borders. The collective insanity of the Hitler regime was intricately linked with the concentration camps, which crushed all dissent. 



By running the concentration camps, the North Korean regime has been able to maintain power even after starving 3 million people to death in peacetime. These camps house some 200,000 to 300,000 political prisoners and their families, who are systematically slaughtered. Even party officials are afraid of being sent there. Hwang Jang-yop, a former secretary of the Workers' Party who defected to the South, said, "Even senior party members can't talk freely at homes for fear of being wiretapped, so they always have important conversations outside." 



The silence of the international community on the barbaric massacres in the concentration camps committed by Kim Jong-il borders on the criminal. Some 17,000 North Korean defectors in the South are complaining about the atrocity, but no country pays any attention. Even the South Korean government and people do not realize how serious the problem is.

Full story here.

North Korea Has Two Ways to Make Bomb

From yesterday's NYT, a bit more context on the DPRK's nuclear ambitions.

SEOUL — North Korea’s announcement on Friday that its experiment in enriching uranium is at “completion stage” marks the strongest signal yet from Pyongyang that it is racing to develop a second method of making nuclear bombs.

North Korea also said it was building additional nuclear bombs with plutonium it had recently gleaned from its reactor in Yongbyon. It said it had completed reprocessing the latest batch of spent fuel unloaded from the reactor, repeating the procedure believed to have given the North enough plutonium for six to eight bombs.

For years, officials in Washington and elsewhere have debated whether North Korea was pursuing a clandestine uranium-enrichment program. After years of denial, North Korea announced in April that it intended to enrich uranium.

In June, it said its enrichment program was in an “experimental stage.”

Full story here.

DPRK In Final Stage of Enrichment?

From CNN:

(CNN) — North Korea’s state-run news agency said Thursday that the country has sent a letter to the United Nations announcing that “reprocessing of spent fuel rods is at its final phase and extracted plutonium is being weaponized.”

North Korea can also now enter the final stage of uranium enrichment, it said in the letter to the president of the U.N. Security Council, according to state-run KCNA.

Despite stating in the letter that they “totally reject” a Security Council resolution in June that demanded that the country no longer pursue nuclear weapons, the North Koreans said they are “prepared for both dialogue and sanctions,” KCNA reported.

The government also warned, “If some permanent members of the UNSC wish to put sanctions first before dialogue, we would respond with bolstering our nuclear deterrence first before we meet them in a dialogue,” according to KCNA.

The news comes on the heels of the Obama administration’s latest attempt to restart stalled nuclear negotiations with the reclusive state. In the coming days, U.S. envoy Stephen Bosworth and the director of the State Department’s Office of Korean Affairs, Sung Kim, will meet with officials representing China, Japan, South Korea and Russia — all countries partnering with the United States in talks aimed at ending North Korea’s nuclear program.

Hmmm.