Blame for NoKo Nuclear Program Goes Beyond China

Posted on August 8, 2017August 8, 2017 by Denise Simon

Photo.2012

Stop just blaming China for being the sole enabler for North Korea’s nuclear and missile program. It is beyond dispute that the moment of reckoning is here for Donald Trump, for he is having a Kennedy/Cuban Missile crisis point in history. But there are other countries that should be blamed and they include Pakistan, Iran and Russia.

When Putin traveled to North Korea for talks with Kim:

Interfax news agency quoted Putin as saying Kim had assured him Pyongyang’s rocket program was entirely peaceful.

Asked if Russia was prepared to offer its rockets for Korean space exploration, Putin said, “Why should only Russia pay? One should expect other countries, if they assert that the DPRK [North Korea] poses a threat for them, would support this project,” Interfax reported.

“One can minimize the threat by supplying the DPRK with its rocket boosters,” it quoted him as saying.

He also said Russia was prepared to do its utmost to improve the situation on the Korean peninsula, and expected other countries to do their part.

“We suggest that the efforts of the Russian Federation alone are not sufficient. We should all — the DPRK, South Korea, as well as the United States, China and Japan — support that process.”

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Historically, Iran has bought a lot with its money. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, thought to be Tehran’s chief nuclear scientist, was almost certainly in North Korea at Punggye-ri in February 2013 to witness Pyongyang’s third atomic test. Reports put Iranian technicians on hand at the site for the first two detonations as well.

Then there was a remarkable confession of Dr A Q Khan, Pakistan’s infamous ‘nuclear’ scientist. It was on 4 February 2004 when Khan appeared on the television and confessed to having supplied nuclear technology and components to North Korea, Iran and Libya. Khan accepted his crimes in English and not in Urdu, which is the language understood by most Pakistanis.

That telecast was actually for the international audience, especially the United States and the European intelligence agencies. Khan explicitly mentioned that this proliferation network was entirely his own and the Pakistani government or authorities were never involved. North Korea’s nuclear ambition started in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Erstwhile Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) agreed to set up their first plutonium-based nuclear reactor at Yongbyon-Kun for peaceful use of nuclear technology. Later, North Korea set up more reactors, signed Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to get access to the latest technology and allowed International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors to inspect its nuclear facilities, but never gave up its desire to have ‘the bomb’.

Apart from China, Pakistan was the only major country in the world who not only maintained diplomatic relations with North Korea but received weaponry from them.

But the cooperation in nuclear and missile field started in the late 1980s. More here.

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North Korea’s unprecedented level of testing and displays of strategic weapons in 2016 indicate that Kim is intent on proving he has the capability to strike the U.S. mainland with nuclear weapons. In 2016, the regime conducted two nuclear tests—including one that was claimed to be of a standardized warhead design—and an unprecedented number of missile launches, including a space launch that put a satellite into orbit. These ballistic missile tests probably shortened North Korea’s pathway toward a reliable ICBM, which largely uses the same technology. Kim was also photographed beside a nuclear warhead design and missile airframes to show that North Korea has warheads small enough to fit on a missile, examining a reentry-vehicle nose cone after a simulated reentry, and overseeing launches from a submarine and from mobile launchers in the field, purportedly simulating nuclear use in warfighting scenarios. North Korea is poised to conduct its first ICBM flight test in 2017 based on public comments that preparations to do so are almost complete and would serve as a milestone toward a more reliable threat to the U.S. mainland. Pyongyang’s enshrinement of the possession of nuclear weapons in its constitution, while repeatedly stating that nuclear weapons are the basis for its survival, suggests that Kim does not intend to negotiate them away at any price.

David Albright—a widely respected expert on proliferation and president and founder of the Institute for Science and International Security—estimated at the end of 2016 that North Korea’s nuclear programs had reached the following status:

• 33 kilograms of separated plutonium (median value of a distribution).

• 175-645 kilograms of weapon-grade uranium, where 175 kilograms corresponds to a median estimate for the case of one centrifuge plant and 645 kilograms corresponds to the median estimate for the case of two centrifuge plants.

• 13 to 30 nuclear weapons, where these values reflect the utilization of 70 percent of the available, estimated stocks of plutonium and weapon-grade uranium. The limits correspond to the median values for the cases of one or two centrifuge plants and each weapon contains either plutonium or weapon-grade uranium.

• Based on this cumulative estimate, North Korea is currently expanding its nuclear weapons at a rate of about three-five weapons per year.

• 30 percent of North Korea’s total stocks of plutonium and weapon-grade uranium are assessed as in production pipelines, lost during processing, or held in a reserve. More here.

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Tillerson has pointed the finger of blame at Beijing and Moscow.

“As the principal economic enablers of North Korea’s nuclear weapon and ballistic missile development program, China and Russia bear unique and special responsibility for this growing threat to regional and global stability,” he said in a statement.

Tillerson’s comments are sure to anger Russia and China. Earlier this month Beijing rejected claims from US president Donald Trump that it had a responsibility to do more to rein in its ally. “I think this either shows lack of a full, correct knowledge of the issue, or there are ulterior motives for it, trying to shift responsibility,” Geng Shuang, a foreign ministry spokesman, told reporters.

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Certain weapons, however, stand in stark contrast to the rest of North Korea’s aging weapons collection. One is what appears to be a copy of the Russian Kh-35 antiship cruise missile. Known in Russia as the Kh-35 Uran and to NATO as the SS-N-25 “Switchblade,” the Kh-35 has a range of seventy nautical miles and a 320-pound high-explosive warhead, flying above the wavetops to stay undetected as long as possible. Guided by active radar, the subsonic missile is roughly comparable to the American Harpoon antiship missile, earning it the nickname “Harpoonski.”

Although the Uran’s development predated the end of the Cold War, the missile never entered Soviet service, joining the Russian Navy only in 2003. The missile first surfaced in North Korea in June 2014, when it briefly appeared in a North Korean propaganda video. The missile, which appeared to be launched from a ship, was identical to the Uran, although the shipboard mounting hardware appeared different from Russian hardware. North Korea launched a volley of four Kh-35s on June 7 from the vicinity of Wonsan into the Sea of Japan.

A new rocket artillery system recently emerged in North Korea. Known as the KN-09 multiple-rocket launcher, the system consists of eight three-hundred-millimeter rocket-launcher tubes on a 6×6 HOWO 6×6 All-wheel Drive Cargo Truck chassis. The presence of fins on the rocket’s nose suggests each rocket is precision-guided, using either China’s Baidu or Russia’s GLONASS satellite-based global positioning systems. More here.

NoKo Crossed the Nuclear Power Threshold, 60?

Posted on August 8, 2017August 8, 2017 by Denise Simon

The best defense is to take them out before they are fired…..we can and we know where they are.

We Know the Locations of N Korea Nuclear Sites

Primer: North Korean delegation wraps up Iran visit

Trip included opening of new embassy and meetings with foreign representatives

North Korea’s newly built embassy in Tehran opened Wednesday, according to the North’s state-run KCNA news agency. It said the new embassy was “built to boost exchanges, contacts and cooperation between the two countries for world peace and security and international justice.”

After the second ICBM test last month, defense experts said it appeared North Korea’s long-range ballistic missile had the range to reach half, if not most, of the continental United States. Iran could have an ICBM capability similar to North Korea within a few years, as just last week it successfully launched a satellite-carrying rocket that some see as a precursor to long-range ballistic missile weapon capability.

‘Extensive’ missile cooperation

“There’s been fairly extensive cooperation on missiles,” said Bunn. “And in fact, early generations of Iranian missiles were thought to be basically modestly adapted North Korean missiles.” More here.

North Korea now making missile-ready nuclear weapons, U.S. analysts say

North Korea has successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its missiles, crossing a key threshold on the path to becoming a full-fledged nuclear power, U.S. intelligence officials have concluded in a confidential assessment.

The new analysis completed last month by the Defense Intelligence Agency comes on the heels of another intelligence assessment that sharply raises the official estimate for the total number of bombs in the communist country’s atomic arsenal. The U.S. calculated last month that up to 60 nuclear weapons are now controlled by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Some independent experts believe the number of bombs is much smaller.

The findings are likely to deepen concerns about an evolving North Korean military threat that appears to be advancing far more rapidly than many experts had predicted. U.S. officials last month concluded that Pyongyang is also outpacing expectations in its effort to build an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of striking cities on the American mainland.

While more than a decade has passed since North Korea’s first nuclear detonation, many analysts believed it would be years before the country’s weapons scientists could design a compact warhead that could be delivered by missile to distant targets. But the new assessment, a summary document dated July 28, concludes that this critical milestone has already been reached.

“The IC [intelligence community] assesses North Korea has produced nuclear weapons for ballistic missile delivery, to include delivery by ICBM-class missiles,” the assessment states, in an excerpt read to The Washington Post. The assessment’s broad conclusions were verified by two U.S. officials familiar with the document. It is not yet known whether the reclusive regime has successfully tested the smaller design, although North Korean officially last year claimed to have done so.

The DIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.

An assessment this week by the Japanese Ministry of Defense also concludes there is evidence to suggest that North Korea has achieved miniaturization.

Kim Jong Un is becoming increasingly confident in the reliability of his nuclear arsenal, analysts have concluded, explaining perhaps the dictator’s willingness to engage in defiant behavior, including missile tests that have drawn criticism even from North Korea’s closest ally, China. On Saturday, both China and Russia joined other members of the U.N. Security Council in approving punishing new economic sanctions, including a ban on exports that supply up to a third of North Korea’s annual $3 billion earnings.

The nuclear progress further raises the stakes for President Trump, who has vowed that North Korea will never be allowed to threaten the United States with nuclear weapons. In an interview broadcast Saturday on MSNBC’s Hugh Hewitt Show, national security adviser H.R. McMaster said the prospect of a North Korea armed with nuclear-tipped ICBMs would be “intolerable, from the president’s perspective.”

“We have to provide all options . . . and that includes a military option,” he said. But McMaster said the administration would do everything short of war to “pressure Kim Jong Un and those around him, such that they conclude it is in their interest to denuclearize.” The options said to be under discussion ranged from new multilateral negotiations to reintroducing U.S. battlefield nuclear weapons to the Korean Peninsula, officials familiar with internal discussions said.

Determining the precise makeup of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal has long been a difficult challenge for intelligence professionals because of the regime’s culture of extreme secrecy and insularity. The country’s weapons scientists have conducted five nuclear tests since 2006, the latest being a 20- to 30-kiloton detonation on Sept. 9, 2016, that produced a blast estimated to be up to twice that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.

But producing a compact nuclear warhead that can fit inside a missile is a technically demanding feat, one that many analysts believed was still beyond North Korea’s grasp. Last year, state-run media in Pyongyang displayed a spherical device that government spokesmen described as a miniaturized nuclear warhead, but whether it was a real bomb remained unclear. North Korean officials described the September detonation as a successful test of a small warhead designed to fit on a missile, though many experts were skeptical of the claim.

Kim has repeatedly proclaimed his intention to field a fleet of nuclear-tipped ICBMs as a guarantor of his regime’s survival. His regime took a major step toward that goal last month with the first successful tests of a missile with intercontinental range. Video analysis of the latest test revealed that the missile caught fire and apparently disintegrated as it plunged back toward Earth’s surface, suggesting North Korea’s engineers are not yet capable of building a reentry vehicle that can carry the warhead safely through the upper atmosphere. But U.S. analysts and many independent experts believe that this hurdle will be overcome by late next year.

“What initially looked like a slow-motion Cuban missile crisis is now looking more like the Manhattan Project, just barreling along,” said Robert Litwak, a nonproliferation expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and author of “Preventing North Korea’s Nuclear Breakout,” published by the center this year. “There’s a sense of urgency behind the program that is new to the Kim Jong Un era.”

While few discount North Korea’s progress, some prominent U.S. experts warned against the danger of overestimating the threat. Siegfried Hecker, director emeritus of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the last known U.S. official to personally inspect North Korea’s nuclear facilities, has calculated the size of North Korea’s arsenal at no more than 20 to 25 bombs. Hecker warned of potential risks that can come from making Kim into a bigger menace than he actually is.

“Overselling is particularly dangerous,” said Hecker, who visited North Korea seven times between 2004 and 2010 and met with key leaders of the country’s weapons programs. “Some like to depict Kim as being crazy – a madman – and that makes the public believe that the guy is undeterrable. He’s not crazy and he’s not suicidal. And he’s not even unpredictable.”

“The real threat,” Hecker said, “is we’re going to stumble into a nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula.”

In the past, U.S. intelligence agencies have occasionally overestimated the North Korean threat. In the early 2000s, the George W. Bush administration assessed that Pyongyang was close to developing an ICBM that could strike the U.S. mainland – a prediction that missed the mark by more than a decade. More recently, however, analysts and policymakers have been taken repeatedly by surprise as North Korea achieved key milestones months or years ahead of schedule, noted Jeffrey Lewis, director of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies’ East Asia Nonproliferation Program. There was similar skepticism about China’s capabilities in the early 1960s, said Lewis, who has studied that country’s pathway to a successful nuclear test in 1964.

“There is no reason to think that the North Koreans aren’t making the same progress after so many successful nuclear explosions,” Lewis said. “The big question is why do we hold the North Koreans to a different standard than we held [Joseph] Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao Zedong’s China? North Korea is testing underground, so we’re always going to lack a lot of details. But it seems to me a lot of people are insisting on impossible levels of proof because they simply don’t want to accept what should be pretty obvious.”

C’mon People It is the Welcoming Cities Initiative

Posted on August 8, 2017August 8, 2017 by Denise Simon

Yes….welcome to our cities and partly thanks the Clinton Global Initiative….ah yes….the Clintons again.

This is all supposed to enhance business, employment and bring more economic success to America…right? Well, how about cost comparisons….like Los Angeles…

Photo/Truthdig

FNC: Illegal immigrant families received nearly $1.3 billion in Los Angeles County welfare money during 2015 and 2016, nearly one-quarter of the amount spent on the county’s entire needy population, according to data obtained by Fox News.

The data was obtained from the county Department of Public Social Services — which is responsible for doling out the benefits — and gives a snapshot of the financial costs associated with sanctuary and related policies.

The sanctuary county of Los Angeles is an illegal immigration epicenter, with the largest concentration of any county in the nation, according to a study from the Migration Policy Institute. The county also allows illegal immigrant parents with children born in the United States to seek welfare and food stamp benefits.

I know you don’t want to read a 94 page document, but at least skim the document. You will learn there are millions upon millions of corrupt dollars floating across the country, for years that put foreign migrants and many illegals at that above Americans for jobs and business development.

Partner Organizations

Welcoming Cities and Counties has been recognized as a 2013 Clinton Global Initiative Commitment to Action

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This initiative is also supported by a growing list of partner organizations, including:

City of Chicago

German Marshall Fund of the United States

Maytree’s Cities of Migration

AS/COA

Sanctuary cities are lawless cities and at the core is the following:

Cities and counties that join Welcoming Cities and Counties

will have the chance to:

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Hear from local government leaders who are making the most of their diversity, by creating

“immigrant -friendly” welcoming plans.

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Learn about large and small communities that are responding to demographic change and supporting long-term immigrant integration in a way that speaks to and benefits all members of the community.

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Access new tools and resources to help advance welcoming resolutions, initiatives and strategies

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Receive support and recognition for their efforts to foster more vibrant, inclusive, and welcoming communities.

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Participate in national and transatlantic learning exchanges that highlight promising practices from globally competitive cities

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How bad is it all?

A new wave of local government policies has emerged across cities that is aimed at improving immigrants’ economic and social integration. This report examines the group of cities that joined the Welcoming America’s Welcoming Cities initiative, a notable example of this new policy movement.

Welcoming America is a national grassroots -driven cooperative that launched the Welcoming Cities and Counties initiative in 2013 to provide a venue for immigrant –

welcoming communities to share resources and exchange best practices. We focus on cities in this report because they make up the majority of the program participants (only four out of 54 local participating governments are counties). Read this document here, and start with page 5.

Some cooperation came from the following:

Numerous individuals helped make this guide possible, but our special appreciation goes to its lead author, Steve Tobocman of Global Detroit and his team, including Francis Grunow, Sloan Herrick, Kyle Murphy, Beth Szurpicki, Kate Brennan, and Raquel Garcia Andersen. We also thank the number of individuals who worked with Steve and his team to provide details on their local efforts, including Amanda Bergson-Shilcock, formerly of the Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvanians, Betsy Cohen of St. Louis Mosaic, Todd Adams at Visibility Marketing, Paul McDaniel at the Immigration Policy Center, and Robyn Webb of the Greater Halifax Partnership. We also want to thank Susan Downs-Karkos and Rachel Peric who provided extremely valuable editing to the document.

We hope you will find this guide to be a useful resource in your work, and that you will stay connected by sharing your ideas and joining our growing network of partners across the United States. For more information, or to get involved, please visit us at www.welcomingamerica.org. You can find more information about the local immigrant

economic development organizations in the Rust Belt, many of which are featured throughout this guide, through the WE Global Network at www.weglobalnetwork.org.