PING:
TITLE: Asia by blog
BLOG NAME: Simon World
Who’s saying what and about whom in Asian blogs this week? Let’s find out. Firstly Harry has the litany of Chinese disasters. Conrad has an interesting piece on the connection between the crooks and the Triads. Daai Tou Laam talks about the pressure on…

PING:
TITLE: Asia by blog
BLOG NAME: Simon World
Who’s saying what and about whom in Asian blogs this week? Let’s find out. Firstly Harry has the litany of Chinese disasters. Conrad has an interesting piece on the connection between the crooks and the Triads. Daai Tou Laam talks about the pressure on…

PING:
TITLE: North Korea supplied nuclear materials to Lybia
BLOG NAME: Chief Wiggles
I find this especially disturbing and once again, goes to prove that you can NOT trust ANYTHING North Korea says. The Marmot nailed this one! UP

Of course, that is a perfectly logical, sound reason for North Korean not to sell N-materials abroad. What worries me is - are they logical?

I don’t mean that in a racial ‘logic capacity’ way, but in a cultural one. Let’s look at South Korea - a country which has been allied to the United States for half a century, whose citizens have had free access to travel, education and information abroad for 15 years or so…and ask yourself this question: how deeply do they understand America, and the West in general?? My personal answer would be - very shallowly.
(In all fairness, I have to say that my fellow Canadian have often stunned me with their utter ignorance of Korea - “Wow, Zdunk, what’s it like living in the jungle?”. However, my clueless compatriots are not even close to starting a war with their cluelessness, so it is harmless enough)

Now, keeping in mind the level of understanding the average Mr. Choi in SK has about the West, lets try to imagine North Korean decision makers. How well do they really - REALLY - understand the ability of America to annihilate them? Or do they just puff their chests and believe their own rants/propaganda/frog-in-a-well superiority?

North Korea makes me nervous because - I worry about the Korean cultural tendencies 1) “I can do anything if I try hard enough!” and 2) “We have superior blood (and others are by default, inferior)” Persistance + delusion = ???

An old quotation: “History is littered with wars that everyone said would never happen”
-can’t remember who said it, sorry. Some historian of the 20’s, I have a dim memory.

Had the missile shipment been to Iraq (as was first thought), the stoppage and seizure would have been lawful under the UN sanctions regime imposed on Iraq, Mr. Laam.

We could have seized the cargo anyway and then offered Yemen full compensation for their financial losses, and maybe some reasonable amount of damages as well. This might strike you as high-handed, Mr. Laam, but it wouldn’t have been piracy.

Since people like you are going to accuse the US of any offense, regardless of the truth of the matter, we should have just kept the stuff anyway. Since we’re going to be accused of the crime, we might as well get some of the benefit. I don’t think Yemen really needs a stockpile of intermediate range ballistic missiles, though I suppose Yemeni pride demands that they have big toys like the big boys.

If you think the US is a “pirate” state now, wait till you see what happens when (oops I mean if) one of these missiles is used against us.

But you do raise an interesting and valid point about the problem of identifying the origin of the yellowcake, which also serves to reinforce just how dangerous this proliferation business is going to get over the next several years, as the NorK and Iranian nuclear programs progress.

One bad actor out there proliferating has to be very careful. With two or three bad actors, they get to “cover” for each other by literally standing in a circle and pointing at each other. Add in the high probability of factions internal to the governments of each state acting independently of each other, and you get smoke and mirrors all around.

I read where there is now a major multilateral (but non-UN) effort to watch and search/seize shipping worldwide, by NATO and other friendly powers, for these illegal nuclear component shipments. One such seizure was the big break in the Libyan case, and evidently was the straw that broke the camel’s back, as far as convincing Gaddaffi to change his mind and give up his attempt to build nukes.

Personally, I hope for every such illegal shipment of nuclear components to end up as an victim of “piracy” by the major world powers. And if we find shipments of NorK missiles to third-world countries that don’t need them, we ought to seize them as well. The first load gets compensated; any further ones should be seized outright.

You might even find that this would ultimately work to the benefit of your own country, Mr. Laam, whichever one that is. I don’t think we need a world where every small country has missiles, nuclear, chemical, or conventional, pointed at each other.

no, it is not time to start thinking about a blockade, mr marmot. wow! so many of you portray yourselves as more caring than the south koreans are about north korean starvation, then you turn around and start talking about starving them even further.

shall we also blockade pakistan for giving nuclear info to kim jong il? if the north koreans need what you recommend, why doesn’t pakistan, a country where a sizable number of people believe in radical islam, deserve the same thing? is osama in north korea, mr marmot?

it won’t be just south korea opposing a blockade, china and japan won’t be helping either.

btw, if you care to answer, have you endeavored to learn mongol? what are your impressions of the language?

i hope you have a good day.

shin jong il

Piece of (nuclear) cake!
As far as I can remember, the whole story was a obvious hoax. The US intel got the “Niger/ Iraq Uranium deal infos” from the Italian intelligence service via the British MI6. And then the CIA tipped off the White House, which send the now famous ex-ambassador with a covert CIA-agent-wife to Niger to do a investigation research and his immediate report result stated, that the whole story was a hoax, but that prevented Georgie Bush Jr. & his mastermind Dicky Tricky Cheney not from using the obvious hoax story in the State of the Union Adress.

Do I trust Col. al-Quaddafi? No, he would tell you that camel dung tastes like “choco pie”. Do I trust Kim Jong-Il? No, even a sole grain of rice gets more trust from me! Do I trust the Bush administration? No, not the slightest brezel bit… and this is the sad part of the story. You can’t trust the government of the liberal, democratic US of A any more. They lie to their own people and the world public more shamelessly than any other administration did ever before. Even a ruthless Niccol?쨀 Macchiavelli would be beet red ashamed about the current bunch of liars and manipulators in the White House.

Did it come from the CIA spying on N Korea? (Remember surveillance led to the US piracy last year of a North Korean ship with missiles bound for the middle east (yemen??)) Nope.

Did the info come from the Libyans? Nope. The article says that the Libyans couldn’t possibly know who the source of the uranium was.

The info came from people associated with Khan’s network in Pakistan claiming that they weren’t the ones responsible for the uranium export. (Honest, it’s not us… hey, look over there.) Wait, I forgot that Pakistan isn’t part of the “axis of evil”, so they couldn’t possibly lie about their role in nuclear proliferation around the world.

I agree South Korea will piss it away as quickly as possible and come to the defense of their brother. We just saw story today about SK asking the others (US) to soften its stance.

I think “tons” is the key word besides “nuclear” in the latest news.

At some point soon, the US will have to reach a make or break point with our dear friends in the South.

If the South goes, as I and Paul think, out of its way to defend the North against the latest charges, the US should write them off (for the most, most part).

If selling nuclear material won’t get them to get tough with NK (in words and deeds), then we have to plan around them.

Not having South Korea on board ties our hands (in my opinion) with the military option, and I wouldn’t go for such an option anyway given NK’s first wave firepower.

But we should have plans on hand for blocades and more aggressive pressure on the North without South Korea.

I would also kick up to hyper notch efforts to rot NK out from the inside —- with both overt and covert.

There are probably dozens of things I could dream up in a couple of hours the US could do to try to turn NK citizens against their government.

It is time to start those things full force —- if the nuclear material selling scandal is anywhere near as serious as it sounds….

Yellowcake is only the first stage of obtaining purified uranium from raw ore. Any country which has uranium ore available for mining can refine yellowcake.

The hard part is separating out the U-238 isotope, the only U isotope which is “fissionable” and which (I think) constitutes less than 1% of all the uranium in any quantity of yellowcake. (The rest of the uranium is other isotopes, mostly U235; these can be used as the notorious “depleted” uranium for tank armor and armor-piercing shells, but not for nukes).

There are a variety of ways to “enrich” it (ie make approx 30 to 35 lbs of 99%+ U-238, enough for one fission bomb), but all are laborious and take several years.

The standard enrichment methods nowadays are “centrifuges” of varying degrees of sophistication (the notorious aluminum tubes are needed for these). The materials Gaddafi just turned over to the US and Brits (recently displayed for the press in the US, with almost no media publicity) had components of centrifuges, but no respectable working ones (if I remember correctly — sorry no link handy).

Yellowcake is probably found all over the world. I would guess NorK probably privately considered Gaddafi’s efforts towards nukes disjointed and even clownish, but were happy to sell him basic yellowcake anyway — his plentiful oil income definitely was/is his one good feature. NorK probably figured privately that such a sale was “safe”, as Gaddafi’s enrichment efforts would probably never succeed.

I’m pointing all this out because I think I’m replicating what the private opinion of the current ROK administration, as expressed to the Americans, will be.

My further point is that I think we reached a “blockade imposition” level when the CIA decided that North Korea now has at least two working nukes, and is now on the way to 6 or 8.

But if the ROK doesn’t consider that grounds for supporting a blockade, then they certainly won’t agree that a sale of a “li’l old” amount of yellowcake constitutes one — will they?

[BTW, I'm not sure but I don't think "yellowcake" is a particularly good ingredient for the radioactive component of a radiological or "dirty" bomb. Other nuclear isotopes such as cesium 137 are much "dirtier" and harder to clean up (if I'm not mistaken -- but I defer to anyone who knows better)].

My goodness gracious, I can’t wait to see the postings from our regular ROK visitors here…