Huge US, SKorea war
games called warning to NKorea
AHN YOUNG-JOON,
Associated Press, SAM KIM, Associated Press , Friday, June 22, 2012
Live-fire drills by
the allies are fairly routine, but using the North's national flag as part
of target practice is unusual — and will be seen as a provocation by
Pyongyang, which has previously threatened war for what it called South Korean
insults to the country's national symbols and leadership.
(LEAD) U.S.
supercarrier to lead joint drills with S. Korea off Yellow Sea
kdh@yna.co.kr
SEOUL, June 22
(Yonhap) -- A nuclear-powered American aircraft carrier is in position off the
west coast of South Korea to lead large-scale military exercises aimed at
honing the two countries' joint capability to cope with North Korean
aggression, Seoul officials said Friday, amid the North's saber-rattling.
About 10 warships and submarines, including
the George Washington Carrier Striker Group; 8,000 personnel; and hundreds of
combat aircraft from the allies will take part in the three-day exercises from
Saturday, said officials at Seoul's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).
About 28,500 U.S.
troops are currently stationed in South Korea, a legacy of the Korean War.
Tokyo’s nuclear move
worries neighbors
2012-06-22 By Shin Hyon-hee (heeshin@heraldm.com)
Japan’s recent
amendment to its atomic energy law is rekindling fears about its formidable nuclear and missile
technologies that experts say could quickly turn it into an atomic weapons
power.
Its parliament on
Wednesday passed the revision to the
Atomic Energy Basic Act including “national security” among its
goals. The revision was the first in 34 years.
“The safe use of atomic
power is aimed at contributing to the protection of the people’s life, health
and property, environmental conservation and national security,” the revised
text reads.
In separate space
agency legislation, the Diet also deleted a phrase that confined its
activities to “peaceful purposes.” With the revision, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency
would be allowed to help develop spy and early warning satellites.
Despite political and
legal constraints at home and abroad, the modified laws prompted anxiety that
it could provide legal justification for
Japan’s development of atomic weapons.
Tokyo is estimated to
have up to 1,400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium and about 30
tons of plutonium extracted spent fuel from reprocessing facilities in
Japan, the U.K. and France.
With its technological
prowess, it has the potential to create roughly 6,000 Hiroshima-level bombs,
physical scientists and nuclear experts say.
“Given its top-notch
science technology and skills to transport and fire long-range rockets, Japan
can make hundreds of warheads to mount on them in just six months to one year
if it insists,” Son Yong-woo of the University of North Korean Studies told The
Korea Herald.
Japan has built up its
nuclear capability since the late 1950s while pursuing civilian
space programs. It successfully put its first rocket into orbit in
1970 and mastered the nuclear fuel cycle in the 1980s ― from
producing to loading for electricity, to disposing and reprocessing.
Japan’s hardliner
politicians including some right-leaning Liberal Democratic Party
lawmakers have been pushing to develop nuclear military capability, a call that
is gaining greater backing in the face of China’s rapid emergence and North
Korea’s constant saber-rattling.
Former prime minister
Taro Aso often called for a national debate on whether Japan should have
fission bombs. Tokyo’s outspoken Governor Shintaro Ishihara is one of the most
prominent nuclear weapons advocates.
“All our enemies,
China, North Korea and Russia ― all close neighbors ― have nuclear weapons.
People talk about the cost and other things but the fact is that diplomatic
bargaining power means nuclear weapons,” Ishihara said in a 2011 interview with
The Independent.
The Atomic Energy
Basic Act, a regulatory and institutional framework for its nuclear activities,
laid a legal framework for Japan’s three non-nuclear principles in which it
commits to “not possessing, producing or permitting the introduction of nuclear
weapons.” It also formed the basis for the 1992
Joint Declaration on Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, which
North Korea is criticized for breaching.
The phrase of national
security guarantee was not included in the initial proposal by the Cabinet but
later inserted at the request of the LDP during parliamentary debate, The Tokyo
Shimbun daily reported.
“We cannot rule out
the possibility for practical military use. The amendment harmed the national
interest and is a source of calamity,” said Committee of Seven for World Peace,
founded by Hideki Yukawa, a physicist and Japan’s first Nobel Prize laureate
who has been spearheading an international anti-nuclear crusade.
Tokyo officials
downplayed such concerns and rebuffed any intention to divert nuclear power for
military applications.
Any development of
atomic devices would face obstacles. Tokyo is bound to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, an international accord
aimed at preventing the spread of atomic weapons and related technology.
“In principle, it
would be not as easy for Japan to transform into a nuclear-armed country as
mentioned in some news reports given its membership of the NPT,” Foreign
Ministry deputy spokesperson Han Hye-jin told reporters in Seoul.
Japan was one of the
last nations to sign the pact in 1970 and ratified it six years later
only when the U.S. promised not to interfere with Tokyo’s acquisition of
plutonium and pursuit of independent reprocessing capabilities at its
commercial power plants.
Under a 1968
agreement, the U.S. provided the enriched uranium for Japanese reactors
until it approved Tokyo’s reprocessing in Europe and own facilities and breeder
reactors.
Public confidence in
nuclear energy remains fragile in the aftermath of the Fukushima meltdown.
Until the March 2011 disaster, Japan was the world’s third-largest nuclear
power producer, after the U.S. and France, sourcing more than 30 percent of its
electricity from 54 reactors.
China to Employ
Another 20,000 N.Korean Workers
China has decided to
allow 20,000 North Koreans to work in the Dandong area of Liaoning Province along the Apnok River separating it from
North Korea. Earlier, China permitted another 20,000 North Koreans to
work in the border cities of Tumen and Huchun in Jilin Province along the
Duman River.
The 40,000 include
many factory workers who lost their jobs when South Korea halted
trade with North Korea in 2010 after the North's sinking of the Navy corvette
Cheonan.
A source in Dandong
said the Liaoning government and North Korea's Committee of
Investment and Joint Venture signed an agreement in April authorizing the
dispatch of of 20,000 North Koreans to Dandong.
Liaoning Province
arrived at the number by assessing the needs of businesses in Dandong, the
source added.
Under the agreement
China will issue industrial training visas to 20,000 North Korean workers a
year and pay them 1,300-1,700 yuan (W240,000-310,000) a month depending on the
line of work. They will work in factories that manufacture clothes, food and IT
products, or in mines.
The Economic Observer
reported recently from Dandong that North Korea is pushing the dispatch of
workers to China after they lost their jobs due to South Korean sanctions
imposed when the North sank the Navy corvette Cheonan and shelled Yeonpyeong
Island.
Already in January,
Jilin Province signed an agreement with the North Korean committee to send
20,000 workers to Tumen and Hunchun. They started working in textile factories
in Tumen last month.
The total number of
North Korean workers in China is expected to rise to almost 50,000. Some 8,000 are already working in North Korean
restaurants and construction sites in Beijing and other parts of China.
Experts believe that
Beijing agreed to import North Korean labor to help the North's moribund
economy and new leader Kim Jong-un consolidate his grip on power. Their
dispatch could undermine the effects of international sanctions against the
North and delay possible reforms that could be triggered by worsening economic
conditions there.
"It is not a
violation of UN sanctions to hire North Korean workers, but the money they
send back will end up in Kim Jong-un's coffers and delay the reforms and market
opening that China desires," said a diplomatic source in Beijing.
North Korea dealt with
South Korea's trade ban by drastically increasing exports of minerals,
including iron ore and coal, to China and is now turning to labor export. Early
this year, Kim reportedly issued an order to send as many workers as possible
overseas, even at the risk of a certain number of defections.
Thai police arrest 19
North Korean refugees
BANGKOK (AFP) --
Police arrested 19 North Korean refugees in northern Thailand on Friday who
asked to be sent to a "third country", most likely South Korea,
officials said, and charged them with illegal entry.
The 11 women and eight
men were taken into custody on a bank of the Mekong river in Chiang Rai
province, some 780 kilometers (490 miles) north of Bangkok, after they
disembarked from a boat, local police said.
An immigration officer
confirmed the arrests, explaining they will be fined or jailed in lieu of
money, and sent to a holding centre in Bangkok to wait to see if another
country will accept them.
Almost all refugees
escaping from North Korea make their way on foot to China but face repatriation
if caught there.
Many then travel
surreptitiously on what is nicknamed the "underground railway" to
Southeast Asia and then seek resettlement in South Korea.
The Mekong river snakes through China's Yunnan province,
Myanmar and Laos before reaching Thailand, where the refugees often
disembark in the knowledge Thai authorities will not repatriate them to North
Korea.
Some 22,000 North
Koreans have defected from their impoverished and hunger-stricken homeland for
South Korea since the 1950-1953 war, the vast majority in recent years
UN Sees China Behind
North Korea Embargo Breach: Report
A UN panel has found Chinese involvement in more than half of
the suspected violations of the North Korean arms and luxury goods embargoes,
a Japanese media report said Friday.
The panel identified
38 instances in which banned goods
have gone to or from North Korea. Of these, 21 have involved China, the Asahi
Shimbun reported, citing unnamed sources.
The panel, created in 2009 after the
North’s second nuclear test, reviewed the implementation of UN Security
Council resolutions banning trade with North Korea in certain goods, the paper
said.
In the majority of
cases examined, Chinese ports served as transit points or Chinese firms were
involved as intermediaries, it said, adding the panel’s report could be
released as early as next week.
Of the 21 cases linked
with China, two involved the export or import of items related to weapons of
mass destruction or ballistic missiles, the Asahi said.
One of them was a 2007
attempted shipment from North Korea to Syria — via the Chinese port of Dalian —
of electronic parts and metal plates to be used for ballistic missiles, the
Asahi said.
The other was a 2010
shipment from Taiwan, via China, to North Korea of machine tools that could
have military applications.
Six other cases
involved the export or import of weapons. The remaining 13 cases were about
imports of luxury goods to North Korea, the Asahi said.
Friday’s report followed earlier claims that a Chinese
firm had exported four giant trucks capable of transporting and launching
ballistic missiles in August.
The vehicles were
likely those on display at the huge military display in April marking the
centennial of the birth of the state’s founder Kim Il-Sung, the Asahi said.
However, the UN panel
did not include this in the tally as an investigation into the claims is still
ongoing, the paper said.
The panel issued an
earlier report in November 2010, and said North Korea has established
elaborate schemes to evade sanctions, including false labeling, illicit
financial transactions and use of shell and front companies.
