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Jo Sul
02-10-2005, 08:17
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/asiapcf/02/10/nkorea.talks/index.html

(CNN) -- Citing what it calls U.S. threats to topple its political system, North Korea says it is dropping out of six-party nuclear talks and will "bolster its nuclear weapons arsenal," North Korea's official news agency KCNA reported.

Thursday's report was the first public claim by North Korea to actually possess nuclear weapons.

In the past, Pyongyang has claimed to have the ability and the right to produce them. U.S. officials said in April 2003 that North Korea claimed in private meetings to having at least one nuclear bomb.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called on North Korea to "reconsider their decision" to withdraw from the talks or risk further isolation, The Associated Press reported.

Rice said the North Korens, by leaving negotiations, would be "deepening their isolation because everyone in the international community, and most especially North Korea's neighbors, have been very clear that there needs to be no nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula in order to maintain stability in that region." (Full story)

In the statement reported by KCNA, the North Korean Foreign Ministry said: "We have shown utmost magnanimity and patience for the past four years since the first Bush administration swore in."

"We cannot spend another four years as we did in the past four years and there is no need for us to repeat what we did in those years."

The United States, the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia have held three rounds of six-party talks since 2003, aimed at persuading the North to abandon its nuclear weapons development in return for economic and diplomatic rewards.

But no significant progress was reported in those talks, all hosted by China, North Korea's last remaining major ally.

A fourth round of talks scheduled for last September did not take place because North Korea refused to attend, citing what it called a "hostile" U.S. policy.

Thursday's statement from the North Korean foreign ministry said the country's nuclear weapons are "for self-defense to cope with the Bush administration's evermore undisguised policy to isolate and stifle the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea)."

The communist state said it felt "compelled to suspend" participation in the six-nation talks "for an indefinite period."

"We have wanted the six-party talks but we are compelled to suspend our participation in the talks for an indefinite period till we have recognized that there is justification for us to attend the talks and there are ample conditions and atmosphere to expect positive results from the talks," the Foreign Ministry said.

"The U.S. disclosed its attempt to topple the political system in the DPRK at any cost, threatening it with a nuclear stick. This compels us to take a measure to bolster its nuclear weapons arsenal in order to protect the ideology, system, freedom and democracy chosen by the people in the DPRK.

'Axis of evil'
In his inaugural address on January 20, U.S. President George W. Bush did not mention North Korea by name. But he said U.S. efforts have lit "a fire in the minds of men.

"It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world," he said.

In his February 2 State of the Union address, Bush only briefly mentioned North Korea, saying Washington was "working closely with governments in Asia to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions."

Bush's tone was in stark contrast to his speech three years ago, when he branded North Korea part of an "axis of evil" with Iran and Iraq. It raised hopes for a positive response from North Korea.

Earlier this month, Bush and South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun agreed to push for an early resumption of the six-nation talks.

But Pyongyang called Bush's call for the spread of freedom in his January 20 inaugural speech as a diabolical U.S. scheme to turn the world into "a sea of war flames."

"In his inauguration speech, Bush trumpeted that 'fire of freedom will reach dark corners of the world.' This is nothing but a plot to engulf the whole world in a sea of war flames and rule it by imposing a freedom based on power," North Korea's state-run Pyongyang Radio said early this month.

Despite pulling out of the six-nation nuclear talks and saying Thursday it will "bolster" its nuclear arsenal, the Foreign Ministry statement said North Korea's "principled stand to solve the issue through dialogue and negotiations and its ultimate goal to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula remain unchanged."

Sohn Jie-ae, CNN's Correspondent in the South Korean capital Seoul, said the possibility of North Korea returning to the talks could not be ruled out.

She said officials from the other countries involved would try to convince North Korea to reverse its decision.

QRQ 30
02-10-2005, 09:31
This is sad but true: The technology has been here for 60 years and there is no way to prevent others from getting it any more than the long bow or gun powder. Perhaps, just perhaps it is a good thing. The knowledge of the present nuclear powers that their use would result in MUTUAL destyruction has kept them from use. Of course a bigger threat would be tactical nukes which the Soviet Union really feared.

That Java Guy
02-10-2005, 20:30
I've got a baaadddddd feeling about this Bob!



Damn! I hate being cold, wet and surrounded by hungry communists :cool:


Dan

QRQ 30
02-10-2005, 20:57
I've got a baaadddddd feeling about this Bob!



Damn! I hate being cold, wet and surrounded by hungry communists :cool:


Dan

Actually, I<HO the bigger danger is of N Korea selling materials. The are already a major supplier of weapons to third world countries, criminals and terrorists.

casey
02-11-2005, 07:32
They are not alone....



Russia dismisses Chechen nuclear bomb claim
08 Feb 2005 12:40:57 GMT

Source: Reuters

By Sonia Oxley

MOSCOW, Feb 8 (Reuters) - Russia dismissed as scaremongering a claim by exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky that Chechen rebels had a nuclear bomb.

Berezovsky, who lives in London but has close links with Chechen rebels after serving as a negotiator between the Kremlin and militants in the late 1990s, told a Russian newspaper on Tuesday that the rebels possessed a portable nuclear device.

"Moscow does not believe in the presence of such a nuclear device with the Chechen rebels, nor, correspondingly, in the possibility of using it to carry out a terrorist act," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

"We do not exclude that there will be yet more of this "scaremongering", the aim of which is to sow in Russia a mood of vulnerability and nervousness."

In an interview published in Komsomolskaya Pravda daily, Berezovsky said "trusted people" had told him about the bomb.

"It is a portable nuclear (bomb). Some part of it is missing at the moment, but these are small details," he said. "I wrote a letter to the FSB (Security Service) in autumn about this."

He told Ekho Moskvy radio that Chechens had told him about the bomb two-and-a-half years ago.

"I was told that it was possible to buy the device, a price was even named," he told the radio. "I was also told that the device could be delivered to any part of Europe or Russia."

UNLIKELY TO GO OFF

Experts said such a device would have been stolen around the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and was unlikely to be in working order.

"Even if such a device exists, it is impossible to modernise it and make it battle-ready in the field or abroad," Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Centre for Strategic and Technological Analysis, told Ekho Moskvy.

"The likelihood of this device, if it exists, of exploding is precisely zero."

Berezovsky's Kommersant newspaper published an interview on Monday with separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov in which he called for peace talks with Moscow. Government officials were angry with the paper for "publishing an interview with a bandit".

Last week, Maskhadov ordered a ceasefire by his forces in what he called a gesture of goodwill aimed at ending the decade-long conflict in the North Caucasus region.

The Kremlin has yet to respond, although leaders of the region's pro-Moscow government have branded the move a cynical ploy to buy time while the rebels regroup.

The Foreign Ministry said Berezovsky's nuclear bomb claim aimed to frighten people in the same way that a British Channel 4 News interview with Chechen guerrilla commander Shamil Basayev had last week.

Russia tried to block the broadcast in which Basayev said rebels were planning more attacks like the Beslan school hostage-taking that killed more than 330 people -- half of them children -- last year



This is the same FSB that laughed when the Chechens told them in 1995 that they had left an RDD in Imavelski Park in Russia .....until they found it.