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North Korea Agrees To Suspend Nuclear Activities
Hugh Pickens writes writes "In a breakthrough in negotiations with the secretive communist nation the Guardian reports that North Korea has agreed to suspend nuclear activities and to a moratorium on nuclear and long-range missile tests. According to U.S. State department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, North Korea has agreed to allow International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors to verify and monitor the moratorium on uranium enrichment and confirm disablement of its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. In return for the moratorium on nuclear activities at this key site, the United States has agreed to finalize a package of 240,000 metric tons of nutritional assistance to North Korea. There will be intensive monitoring to assure the delivery of such assistance is made to those in need, and not diverted to the military or government elites."
North Korea still the best Korea!
In 1992 North Korea agreed to keep the peninsula free of nuclear weapons.
But let's be optimistic, maybe this time around the inspectors will be allowed to do inspections.
TONNES!!! /. is truly broken today
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Played this game before. As soon as the food arrives they will go back to business as usual. Maybe pump a few more billion counterfeit $100 bills on the European markets.
I'm more than a little Tired of reading about all these triumphant negotiation sessions over the years where NK promises to be a good boy just long enough to get the trade concessions, only to violate the agreement shortly there after. This is like the third or forth president in a row that has been duped by these tactics. As each agreement falls apart, there are the usual dire warnings about "grave consequences". These are the code words by which the US State Department looks tough, but signals the other side that the only "grave" involved is the one in which the whole issue will be buried as soon as the grandstanding is over with.
Son of Whack-Job, and Grandson of Whack-a-Doodle has absolutely no incentive to honor this agreement any more than his predecessors did the prior ones. However, a certain government leader needs a feather in his re-election hat. So we get another useless agreement with a perpetual liar state.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
These 240,000 metric tons of nutritional assistance... surely these will be cakes?
Again.
Things won't change until China gets on board.
The last thing we'll do is get into another conflict and repeat the Korean War - everybody knows this.
When North Korea kept saying how it was becoming a nuclear power and testing missiles, you knew they pretty much were having a strongman throw wood-and-crushed-soda-can toasters into the ocean. Now, perhaps, they've managed to actually do something.
The first time they promised they ment it. Second time they REALLY ment it. It's different this time though, this time they REALLY REALLY mean it. In other news, a spoiled little brat isn't getting attention so he's acting out.. news at 11.
Hoping for the best, expecting the worst. Could the change in leadership really amount to actual change this quickly?
I'm from corporate and I'm here to help.
The check's in the mail.
Korea agrees to suspend nuclear activities.
North Korea describes fantastic bridge you can buy.
... until the next shipment of food aid is within the country borders. Then, they'll just go back to sabre rattling.
North Korea has agreed to allow International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors to verify and monitor the moratorium on uranium enrichment and confirm disablement of its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon.
Hans Brix!
Great Success! Eternal Leader would be proud.
-Great Successor
Unlike, say, Iran, NK doesn't actually need nukes to level its sworn enemy. It would probably be faster and more convenient to just level Seoul with conventional artillery. Is there any doubt that their nuclear program is just a bartering commodity for aid?
You get one chance to keep your word. This is it.
Have gnu, will travel.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me five or six times... and I'm an American diplomat dealing with North Korea.
Talk is cheap, but at least it's cheaper than body bags. I do like that even the most official statements on this seem to be the equivalent of "Welp, here we go again."
“The United States still has profound concerns regarding North Korean behavior across a wide range of areas, but today’s announcement reflects important, if limited, progress in addressing some of these,” said State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland.
Those words were echoed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who called the agreement a “modest first step in the right direction.”
I think that's Pol-speak for "We've played this game before, we know how it ends, but what's the alternative?"
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
It seems like the USA is always picking up the tab on stuff like this. Why not NATO?
So, if I start a nuclear programme and then stop, someone will give me a quarter of a million tonnes of cake..? This could be worth a go!
is that Best Korea will now be printing all 100 dollar bills and passing the savings along to the US Treasury. Plus some vague rider about extraditing Trey Parker and Matt Stone to Pyongyang.
And the punch line is they were joking - right? Do moonbats love missing the football when Lucy pulls it away or what?
Somewhere in the insane ramblings of the original Kim was the comment that no great breakthrough can come without great struggle.
Couple this ideology with the total worship of self-reliance and you can see where this is going:
NK is too proud to ask for food from outsides (it would defeat their total self-reliance) even though it needs it, instead it rattles the sabre and makes threats, then 'agrees' to back down if the West will provide food.
Wash, rinse, repeat. It all comes together if you keep the first fact in mind. This is the way of NK and will be until the gov't is removed from power.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Who is this "Hugh Pickens writes" guy? I'd prefer if /. editors proofread proofread.
not a good idea since we have no problems with the NK people its the leaders we have problems with.
Now maybe sneaking a few folks into place that can make the Leadership suddenly become very aware of Sight Lines (did you know that a british sniper has hit a target from 8120 feet away??) or otherwise feel UnSafe might do some good.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Meanwhile Israel continues to expand its nuclear weapons stockpile, and USA has no problems whatsoever with it (no, instead USA funds it). Talk about double standards..
I heard on the radio today that within 5 years we will see Chinese companies build factories in NK because the Chinese factory workers are starting to ask for too much money. Why pay a Chinese worker $1 an hour when you can pay $.05 an hour to a NK factory worker? China will continue to make products for the US, and products made for the Chinese market will be made in NK.
Still not a justification for all the "Duped" articles posted on Slashdot!
But nice try anyway! :)
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I will smile when the North Korean government accepts this food aid, then exports it at the market price.
lol
North Korea thinks that it is getting food. Instead, . . .
240,000 metric tons of nutritional assistance
. . . consists of Happy Meals (with toys), Hostess Ding Dongs, Slurpees, Pork Skin Chips, Aerosol Easy Cheese, Chez Doodles, cotton candy, candy corn, etc.
These highly pre-post-processed sugary food stuffs will transform them into fat, lazy drones, unable to construct complicated nuclear weapons.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
It's a long shot, but the price is cheap compared to wars.
What amazes me about this is that it is so inexpensive for the US. Wheat is less than 300 per metric ton so this is only about $72,000,000. A round off error in the US debt and less than the negotiations probably cost.
What would the point be? The people in question are already suffering from an insidious slow-acting poison called "not having any food." Do you think the people in North Korea who are actually causing the problems are suffering from any food shortages?
Arguably the most evil thing we could do would be to give them a _lot_ of good and healthy food for a couple years, and then unexpectedly stop. Kind of the inverse of the "give a man a fish/teach a man to fish" thing.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Hugh Pickens? I imagined it was Slim Pickens himself, in a state of despair, at how there will be no need to let the nukes fly at N. Korea. Oh well, plenty of other ways to trigger the Doomsday device.
(I'm going for that -1 Not Obscure Enough Reference Bastard rating!)
Your suggestion gets pretty much a perfect 10 on the insanity meter.
More likely it's the new leader trying to shower his people with food to associate a good year with his rise to power--and an attempt at good will from the international community who are hoping they can relax.
Exactly. It's worth noting that this is a completely new leader than Kim Jong-il, who is the one who set N. Korea to developing nuclear weapons. It's yet to be seen what he does.
Most notably, Kim Jong-un was born nearly thirty years after the Korean war. His viewpoint on politics is going to be vastly different than the previous generation.
That doesn't mean "celebrate, Korea is going to be a free country and flying unicorns are going to be dropping gold nuggets from the clouds." It does mean "things are likely to change, don't expect the new North Korea to be identical to the old one."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
So we send more food to North Korea, the military and elites get bigger rations.
While the exact food supplied as aid may not be going to the military/elites the food aid would allow them to divert other supplies elsewhere.
Food aid is a great idea though, it is one of the most economically damaging things you can do to a country. Start dumping cheap/free food on their markets, put all the local farmers out of business. Farmers and families become disgruntled, have no income or work. The land degrades and the country becomes completely dependant on external aid. The next step is to provide weapons to the groups of ex farmers.
Deleted
Troll or not, somebody owns the cake factory.
This is the third or fourth president not to let this area of the world explode into a war that could easily go global. Little kiddies like Icebike think the world is somekind of perfect place where perfect solutions exist. In the real world, all you can do is often to stop thing from getting a lot worse really fast.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
For all the jaded souls who think there is no hope and this will degenerate like the last time. Fatty Kim is a product of Western universities. He attended school in Europe (Switzerland I believe) - he has experienced western lifestyle and no doubt sees his own people not having the same lifestyle.
He's unlikely to want to give up power- but he may just have been infected by enough free-thought whilst in Europe to legitimately want change. There is hope that Fatty Kim is not just a younger, hungrier, clone of his father.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
...a younger, hungrier, clone of his father.
If he is anything, hungry is not it.
Kim Jong-Un was quoted as saying "My Father was batshit crazy. He wanted nukes so he could start World War III and live out the nuclear holocaust in under-mountain cities. I just want to rule a united Korea with an Iron Fist. Great compromise, yes?"
Have you ever considered that North Korea is actually a Utopia, and that our government is the one lying to us?
This shouldn't surprise anyone. Food is a cheap price to pay to keep the Norks from disturbing the good guys.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
And when the food is gone, they will start up their illegal activity....and we'll give them more food to stop, which they will use up and start the cycle again.
ABSOLUTELY NOT.
I am really insulted by your comment. First time I have used caps in over 10 years of Slashdot.
The famine is 1.5 MILLION people. Check out http://northkorea.org/
This page includes real world articles and a donation drive by a famous journalist.
I built for free and maintained for over a decade a website to donate food and medicine to people in the North Korean famine, on behalf of a courageous journalist who assembled donations of clothing, food and medicine, brought it to North Korea himself and donated it directly to people there while documenting it. I put videos of tiny children terminally ill with malnutrition and coughing with pneumonia online when QuickTime was still something new.
Bernie Krisher, the journalist and past Newsweek editor who did this project, even had a stroke in North Korea once due to the strain of holding a bag of rice up for the camera but he did a lot through one person's extremely stubborn do or die approach. To him anybody who was not interested was a loser. I remember his anger when Japanese milk manufacturers refused to provide infant formula even. He's not a whack-job, he's a world-class reporter who after retirement decided to give something back to the world and was moved by human suffering.
He is a hero, and most of his donation work over the years has been actually in Cambodia, where he built a newspaper, a hospital, hundreds of rural schools, started medical campaigns and so on. I learned a lot watching his work. All I did was put some of them online.
The main message I would like to give you and Slashdot which idiotically gave you a "Score 4: Insightful" is, the Internet is a person to person connection. It doesn't matter what the heck the leader of a country says. You can deal with any person in the world who has a net connection as one human to another. Now put the shoe on the other foot and imagine it was you who is stuck in a malnutritioned unempowered hell like these starving people.
When the famine came during the North Korean flood, and all the crops were washed over with silt and people got to eating tree bark, Bernie was teaching them how to lab cultivate mushrooms and trying any way to make a dent personally. If it was you stuck there in a famine I bet you would have thanked your lucky stars. This is not a band-aid but a crack in the dam that can be widened through the Internet. Whoever is in charge in NK has no bearing whatsoever on what is the right thing to do.
I am not going to comment on the horrific political brinksmanship and lost hopes of all those intergovernmental negotiations. I hope it works this time, I suppose there's a chance, there always is. It would be nice if there is some way to ensure that kids get the food, I expect many will. I put another letter online for Bernie last year, where he is collecting donations.
Maybe you can help boost google traffic to it by linking to it. The famine is 1.5 MILLION people. There are real on the ground photos on that site from another courageous Reuters journalist too. Check them out and see if you still think it is silly to try and save these lives.
The site is: http://northkorea.org/
Is it yellow cake? It's my favorite kind!
See King Mswati III, of Swaziland, who went to school in England from the ages of 14 to 18.
Many thought that his western education would mean he would be a different type of leader to his father, but he doesn't appear to be as progressive as most would wish.
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