North Korea Builds New Nuke Facility

Hey Obama, how’s that “negotiate without preconditions” shit going?

North Korea’s claim of a new, highly sophisticated uranium enrichment facility could be a ploy to win concessions in nuclear talks or an attempt to bolster leader Kim Jong Il’s apparent heir.

But whatever the reason for the revelation, which a seasoned American nuclear scientist called “stunning,” it provides a new set of worries for the Obama administration, which is sending its special envoy on North Korea for talks with officials in South Korea, Japan and China this week.

Why is he surprised? North Korea is a belligerent little cesspool with an inferiority complex. It desperately wants “respect” on the world stage, and Kim Jong Il rattles his little saber every time he wants attention.

The scientist, Siegfried Hecker, said in a report posted Saturday that he was taken during a recent trip to the North’s main Yongbyon atomic complex to a small industrial-scale uranium enrichment facility. It had 2,000 recently completed centrifuges, he said, and the North told him it was producing low-enriched uranium meant for a new reactor.

Hecker, a former director of the U.S. Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory who is regularly given rare glimpses of the North’s secretive nuclear program, said the program had been built in secret and with remarkable speed.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said uranium enrichment activities would violate U.N. resolutions and agreements by North Korea over its nuclear program.

“From my perspective, it’s North Korea continuing on a path which is destabilizing for the region. It confirms or validates the concern we’ve had for years about their enriching uranium,” Mullen, the top U.S. military officer, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

The Obama administration has shunned direct negotiations with North Korea following its nuclear and missile tests last year and in the wake of an international finding that a North Korean torpedo sank a South Korean warship in March, killing 46 sailors.

North Korea told Hecker it began construction on the centrifuges in April 2009 and finished only a few days before the scientist’s Nov. 12 visit.

Hecker said his first glimpse of the North’s new centrifuges was “stunning.”

“Instead of seeing a few small cascades of centrifuges, which I believed to exist in North Korea, we saw a modern, clean centrifuge plant of more than a thousand centrifuges, all neatly aligned and plumbed below us,” wrote Hecker, a Stanford University professor.

Hecker described the control room as “astonishingly modern,” writing that, unlike other North Korean facilities, it “would fit into any modern American processing facility.”

The facilities appeared to be primarily for civilian nuclear power, not for North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, Hecker said. He saw no evidence of continued plutonium production at Yongbyon. But, he said, the uranium enrichment facilities “could be readily converted to produce highly enriched uranium bomb fuel.”

……U.S. nuclear envoy Stephen Bosworth’s trip to Asia for talks on North Korea comes as new satellite images show construction under way at Yongbyon. That, combined with reports from Hecker and another American expert who recently traveled to the atomic complex, appear to show that the North is keeping its pledge to build a nuclear power reactor.

…….Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the Seoul-based University of North Korean Studies, said the North’s uranium disclosure is meant to force the United States back into nuclear negotiations.

The disclosure, Yang said, also is aimed at a domestic audience during the succession process. “The North wants to muster loyalty among military generals by showing them the North will continue to bolster its nuclear deterrent and uphold its military-first policy,” Yang said.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101121/ap_on_re_as/koreas_nuclear

While the rest of North Korea starves, the gargoyle in Pyongyang lives high on the hog, props up his military, and feeds a line of shit to the population that Dear Leader stands up to the big, bad round eyes in America.
The ones with the most to worry about initially, are South Korea and Japan. North Korea would never be able to sustain a war on its own without help from its puppet master, China. If North Korea should attack, (taking advantage of our preoccupation with the war against Islamic shitbags) I foresee the United States quickly lobbing a few well-placed nuclear warheads, in order to avoid the prolonged ‘conventional’ war, which would require the deployment of thousands of troops, logistics and weapons not seen since WWII. This would probably happen under a real president.

Right now, we’re saddled with Obama, who doesn’t have the guts, the ability, or the brains gawd gave a doorknob, to call Kim Jong Il’s bluff and tell him to leap if he’s feelin’ froggy.

Douglas MacArthur was right.

Related posts:
http://sfcmac.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/north-korea-fires-more-misssiles/
http://sfcmac.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/north-korea-launches-missile-obama-defers-to-un/
http://sfcmac.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/north-koreas-answer-to-obama-another-bomb-blast/
http://sfcmac.wordpress.com/2009/06/28/president-milksop-backs-off-on-north-korea/