Steve Quayle News Alerts

March 10, 2003

North Korea test-fired an anti-ship cruise missile into the Sea of Japan on Monday, the second in less than a month, Japan’s Defense Agency chief said. Shigeru Ishiba said the missile didn’t appear to target Japan or any other country in particular.

“WE DON’T think this will have any significant impact on our national safety, but we are monitoring it closely,” he told a parliamentary session.

U.S. officials had sought to minimize the significance of a previous missile test, saying it involved a small weapon and not one of North Korea’s stockpile of long-range ballistic missiles.

North Korea has repeatedly accused the United States of plotting an attack, and says its military maneuvers are defensive.

The test came amid a simmering nuclear dispute that flared in October, when U.S. officials said Pyongyang admitted having a covert nuclear program in violation of a 1994 deal. Washington and its allies suspended fuel shipments; the North retaliated by expelling U.N. monitors, withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and restarting a nuclear reactor.

The launch also came just one day after U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said that United States would eventually talk with North Korea about the country’s nuclear aims, but reiterated U.S. views that others in the region should take part.

“I think eventually we will be talking to North Korea, but we’re not going to simply fall into what I believe is a bad practice of saying the only way you can talk to us is directly when it affects other nations in the region. This time we need a solution that all nations have bought into,” Powell said on the CNN “Late Edition” television show.

The United States has rejected calls from North Korea to hold direct talks on the country’s reactivated nuclear program, and China and Russia have resisted U.S. entreaties to pressure North Korea to agree to multilateral talks.

Washington is eager to keep the nuclear standoff from complicating its buildup for a potential war with Iraq, but the issue threatened to escalate further.

“I hope North Korea understands that it is also in their interest to have all the nations in the region (be) a part of this dialogue, and within that broader dialogue we’ll be talking to North Korea,” Powell said.

N. KOREAN ACCUSATIONS

The North claims the Bush administration is planning pre-emptive strikes on its military bases and nuclear facilities, which U.S. officials believe are being used to make atomic bombs.

North Korea’s state KCNA news agency said the U.S. Department of Defense mapped out a plan including “not only cruise missile strikes and massive air raids, etc., but the use of tactical nuclear weapons.”

The North’s “army and people will take every possible self-defensive measure to cope with the U.S. bellicose forces’ new war moves,” it said.

The Pentagon has deployed 12 B-1 and 12 B-52 bombers to Guam, about 2,000 miles from North Korea in case of conflict in the region.

“These moves indicate that the U.S. Air Force is taking the lead in implementing the U.S. imperialists’ strategy to mount a pre-emptive attack,” said Pyongyang’s official Rodong Sinmun newspaper.

Tension between Pyongyang and the United States increased last week after North Korean fighter jets intercepted a U.S. reconnaissance plane over the sea between the Korean Peninsula and Japan.

IAEA WORRIES
Meanwhile, Chief U.N. nuclear inspector Mohamed ElBaradei warned that the world must not tolerate the North’s ambitions and said in an interview that “all countries must be treated equally.”

When asked whether North Korea poses a greater threat than Iraq, ElBaradei told the German weekly newspaper Bild am Sonntag that “in both cases, we are worried about the proliferation of nuclear weapons.”

“The difference is that, in Iraq, we can now check with a team of highly qualified inspectors whether there is a new nuclear weapons program,” said ElBaradei, who heads the Vienna, Austria-based International Atomic Energy Agency.

“In North Korea, IAEA inspectors were forced out of the country in December, and we know that North Korea is in a position to produce weapons-grade plutonium.”

ElBaradei’s agency has sent the dispute to the U.N. Security Council, which then sent it to a panel of experts.

CALL FOR U.N. MONITORS
U.S. diplomats called for Pyongyang to allow U.N. monitors to return to verify that it wasn’t enriching uranium for its purported nuclear weapons program during the meetings at the North Korean Embassy in Berlin on Feb. 20-21, the Japanese Asahi newspaper reported.

North Korea rejected the demands and the meetings ended in disagreement, the paper said, citing an unidentified former U.S. official who attended the meeting. Pyongyang had proposed a visit by U.S. nuclear inspectors, it said.

U.S. officials were not immediately available for comment Sunday.

In Seoul, an opposition lawmaker urged South Korea to stop cash aid to North Korea, claiming the funds were being used to develop nuclear weapons.

Lee Hahn-koo said former President Kim Dae-jung’s government provided $3.3 billion over the past five years, including $900 million in cash.

“The North’s military would not have been able to achieve its current capacity without the Kim Dae-jung government’s financial aid,” Lee said in a news release.

The nuclear dispute flared in October when Washington said North Korea admitted pursuing a nuclear program.

Washington and its allies cut off oil shipments to the impoverished communist state. The North retaliated by expelling U.N. monitors, moving to reactivate its frozen nuclear facilities and withdrawing from the global Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/850567.asp?0cv=CA00