North Korea Restarts Plutonium Production For Nuclear Bombs (arstechnica.com)

New submitter ReginaldBryan45 quotes a report from Reuters: North Korea has restarted production of plutonium fuel, a senior State Department official said on Tuesday, showing that it plans to pursue its nuclear weapons program in defiance of international sanctions. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAE) said on Monday that it had seen signs based on satellite imagery that show that the secretive country had re-activated the nuclear fuel production reactor at Yongbyon. The analysis by the IAEA pointed to "resumption of the activities of the five megawatt reactor, the expansion of centrifuge-related facility, [and] reprocessing -- these are some of the examples of the areas [of activity indicated at Yongbyon]." U.S. Intelligence tried to infect the Yongbyon site with a variant of the Stuxnet malware last year but ultimately failed. Experts at the U.S.-Korea Institute at John Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington predicted last year that the country's nuclear arsenal could grow to as many as 100 bombs within five years, from an estimated 10 to 16. Naturally, this news is a cause for concern as North Korea had four (failed) test launches in the last two months.

Comments

NK cyber team will hack the vote so trump does not

[Joe_Dragon]

NK cyber team will hack the vote so trump does not win as he will crush NK.

Where Are

[bobstreo]

Seth Rogen and James Franco when you need them?

Tread Carefully

[n3r0.m4dski11z]

Everything in history sets a precedent. As fun as destroying this country sounds, that should not be the defacto way of humanity. Someone needs to come up with a better solution because feature generations will use this as an example. Doing nothing is also not an option even though they are assuredly 98% hype. There's a real crime against humanity going on over there and no one really seems to be able to stop it..

Re:Tread Carefully

[Brett Buck]

The world is perfectly capable of stopping it, the only thing lacking is the will to do so.

Re:Tread Carefully

[Duhavid]

And China has no real desire to stop them.

Re:Tread Carefully

[SuricouRaven]

If the government of NK falls, it results in a flood of refugees. Most would want to go south, some would go north. China would have to deal with them. China's interest in NK lies in stability.

Re:Tread Carefully

[AmiMoJo]

Maybe the US should step back and take a purely defensive posture, and let the other countries in that region real with the situation. Despite all the strong rhetoric flying around, they are actually making progress with NK. For example, Japan has managed to open a dialogue and get NK to investigate historic cases of kidnapping Japanese citizens. It's not resolved fully yet but in the last decade there has been a lot of movement.

Antagonizing NK yearly with "military exercises" and the like is not going to get us anywhere. The only way to sort that country out is to bring them in to the international community and open them up, creating a path for them to move towards democracy and freedom. The only alternative is taking out the leadership, creating a power vacuum and civil war, and probably a very great number of people dead. It sucks that it can't happen faster, but that's reality for you.

Re:Tread Carefully

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

And China has no real desire to stop them.

I have posted on this before. People who care about the subject should read _The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future_ by Victor Cha. It would be fair to say that many in the west, particularly Republicans (and by the way, Cha worked for the George W. Bush administration) overestimate the amount of influence that China has, but it is fair to say that China rarely uses what influence it does have.

Basically China can't really make North Korea do anything. They can influence them, but that's about it. China really doesn't want instability in the region and it knows that the Kim family is crazy and China is telling the truth when they say that they want North Korea to be denuclearized. But North Korea learned from the experiences of Libya and Iraq in particular some lessons that the US wishes they hadn't. Namely that cooperating with the West is in no way a guarantee that they won't turn on you any way (Gaddafi in Libya) and that if you don't have nukes, the US may remove you from power any way (Saddam in Iraq). Survival of the Kim regime is paramount so the current Kim will never give up nukes. And North Korea has a Stalinist state where people are both brainwashed and unwilling to fight the big guy in charge because if they stand up they may be the only ones, so everybody cooperates in keeping him alive even though they fear him and know that doing so may be a really bad idea for their own livelihood.

Basically China views all post-North Korea scenarios as really really bad for them and unacceptable. They know it is inevitable that the regime will eventually fall, but they want that to be the problem of the next generation to deal with. China deeply fears a united pro-US Korea that will have US troops stationed on its borders and they will not do anything to enable that outcome. Plus, they are raping the North Korea countryside for rare earths (the only thing of any real value in North Korea - the land there is very poor for agricultural purposes when you know what you are doing, let alone under Communism) at cut rate prices and they have a big economic interest in keeping that business going. So China has basically zero incentive to do anything that will result in the Kim regime leaving. Note too that North Korea borders a part of China with a relatively large ethnic Korean population because China basically stole this part of Korea many hundreds of years ago from an old Korean kingdom and never kicked out the people who lived there. So China fears any regime change because the border is somewhat porous and they could be overwhelmed with North Korean refugees once the government falls. So you can see how from China's side they view all North Korean regime changes as a lose-lose scenario for them even though they are beyond being tired of the North Koreans being troublesome. You have to give old Boris Yeltsin some credit as he stopped all aid there over 20 years ago and left China holding the bag for 100% of North Korea's aid because China didn't want the regime to fall.

Re:Tread Carefully

[Uberbah]

The U.S. and S. Korea are not "antagonizing" the Norks.

Foal Eagle makes a bad liar out of that western exceptionalism. One of the largest annual military exercises in the world, practiced annually since '97, to wage a "defensive" war against North Korea. Which, I'm sure, is how western exceptionalists would view it if Russia and China practiced a "defensive" war off the coast of California, involving hundreds of ships, planes, and hundreds of thousands of troops.

And you wonder why NK started nuclear detonation tests ten years later.

Re:NK cyber team will hack the vote so trump does

[Applehu Akbar]

"NK cyber team will hack the vote so trump does not win as he will crush NK."

But if the cyber team is too successful it will elect Sanders, who will bomb NK in grounds that the plutonium reactors could be used to generate power.

What else could she do?

[jcr]

Keep in mind, Hillary isn't a diplomat. She had the Department of State tossed to her as a consolation prize to shut her idiot fans up. She has no negotiation skills, and waltzing into a meeting with the Norks with her usual "Qbey me, you fucking peasants!" attitude would be worse than doing fuck-all.

-jcr

Re:Interesting rant

[Sique]

Why does the completely misguided idea of George Soros aiding Hitler arise again and again? Just because he said in an interview, that the strong bond between him and his father during the early 1940ies made this time his most happy time in life, despite Budapest being ruled by the pro-Nazi Horthy regime and the constant danger of deportation? And indeed, George Soros was also lucky as the deportation of the hungarian jews stopped when Miklós Horthy ousted Döme Sztójay and installed Géza Lakatos as the next head of government and the Minister of the Interior Béla Horváth ordering Hungarian gendarmes to use deadly force against any deportation effort, thus the jews in Budapest were not deported, differently than the jews everywhere else in Hungary.

There were even rumours spread George Soros would have been a member in the Hitler Youth, which is completely impossible with George Soros being hungarian, and the Hitler Youth being solely for german (and after the Anschluss also austrian) boys -- no exceptions made, especially not for an hungarian jew living in Budapest. Hungary, despite being dominated by Hitler Germany, was still a country on its own, and german civil organisations like the Hitler Youth or Kraft durch Freude didn't have any sub-organisations in Hungary. It's clear that those rumours are put into the world purposely to discredit George Soros, as they are completely unfounded and don't hold up to reality.

Re:Late.

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Wow. What a bunch of yellow ass-niggers.

Here, FTFY.

Re:NK cyber team will hack the vote so trump does

[Mashiki]

Obama has already done a pretty good job at that, much like Cameron did in the UK.

Re:But then

[CrimsonAvenger]

If you can't get a lift vehicle off the ground without problems what good are those bombs?

Their airplanes work just fine. And Peking is within range, as is Tokyo.

Or didn't you know that a nuclear weapon can be delivered by airplane? Hell, you can put a modern one into a large suitcase and deliver it via the daily commericial flight to Peking....

Re:Interesting rant

[PopeRatzo]

1. The Democrat-founded KKK did NOT endorse Trump.

http://www.politico.com/story/...

Only the sort of stupid people who get their news from Comedy Central and SNL and therefore think Sarah Palin said she could see Russia from her house

https://youtu.be/iGSJCDw3ZBw

Sounds like are confident that Hilary will win

[no1nose]

And the US will continue to have weak foreign policy.