Trump Transition: Conservative Christmas

Energy secretary nominee Rick Perry, a former Texas governor and a longtime conservative government standard-bearer, visits Trump Tower in New York during the president-elect's Cabinet hiring spree in December. /Getty Images photo by Drew Angerer

Conservative Americans found an unexpected haul of presents under the Christmas tree this year: a bigly box bursting open with a business-tycoon president-elect and a Cabinet stuffed with billionaires and plutocratic ideologues.

Several of the executive-department nominees are more akin to a wolf pack guarding the whole farm than a fox guarding the hen house.

Trump's nominee for Housing and Urban Development secretary, Ben Carson, is a retired neurosurgeon and former Republican primary-season rival of the president-elect. He has no public housing experience and a self-help ideology that seems ill-suited to providing an essential safety-net service. /Getty Images photo by Andrew Burton


Trump's nominee for Education secretary, Michigan Republican Party bigwig billionaire Betsy DeVos, has no experience in public education, including with her own children. She favors private-school vouchers and charter schools as solutions--and likely poison pills--for struggling public schools.

Trump's nominee for Energy secretary, two-time GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry, has advocated dismantling the department. While calling for the agency's demise in an epic 2011 debate gaffe, he forgot the department's name.

Trump's nominee for Health and Human Services secretary, U.S. Rep. Tom Price, R-Georgia, favors a free-market approach to medicine that includes slashing HHS regulations and privatizing Medicare.

Trump's nominee for Environmental Protection Agency administrator, E. Scott Pruitt, has been a fierce critic of the EPA in his current role as Oklahoma attorney general. Pruitt is among the named petitioners in a 25-state lawsuit against the EPA over greenhouse gas regulations.

As the country embarks on Republican government in the White House, both houses of Congress, and a majority of statehouses, a host of hurdles that require united effort confronts the apparently partisan Trump administration: healthcare reform; national governments that threaten global security such as North Korea; external economic threats from powerful competitors and volatile global markets; internal economic challenges including a dilapidated infrastructure, an aging population, a skewed concentration of wealth, and disruptive waves of automation that upend the workforce; roiled race relations; immigration reform; and climate change.

Tackling these hurdles from the right, or any single-minded approach, is doomed to failure measured in blood and national treasure.

North Korea reaches nuclear-tipped tipping point

North Korea tests a ballistic missile in December 2012, deploying "an object" in Earth's orbit, according to the North American Aerospace Defense Command. The three-stage rocket could be capable of delivering a warhead to Alaska or the West Coast of the United States. /Image via AP

City-buster nuclear bomb: Check!

Intercontinental ballistic missile: Check!

Miniaturized nuclear warhead: In development.

With Friday's test of a Hiroshima-scale nuclear bomb, North Korea has firmly staked the totalitarian country's claim to nuclear-power status. The South Korean military estimates the explosive yield of the blast at about 10,000 tons of TNT. The nuclear bombed dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 packed 12 to 15 kilotons of explosive yield, leveled 90 percent of the city and killed 80,000 people in a flash.

The nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in August 1945 reduced the city to rubble. Dubbed "Little Boy," the American nuclear bomb had about the same explosive force as the atomic device that North Korea tested last week, according to the South Korean military. /Image via www.nbcnews.com

North Korea has either successfully tested or is actively developing enough elements of a fully capable nuclear-weapons arsenal that the time has come to seriously face the reality that the world's most powerful totalitarian nation will soon be threatening at least half the Earth with atomic Armageddon.

With last week's Earth-shaking blast at the Punggye-ri nuclear test site, the Orwellian regime of Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang has proven the ability unleash Hiroshima-scale destruction with atomic bombs. To become capable of threatening at least half the world with thermonuclear blackmail, all that North Korea has to prove now is the ability to miniaturize atomic bombs to equip nuclear-tipped missiles.

The North Korean military is actively developing and testing missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads to regional neighbors such as Japan, including truck-mounted and submarine-fired ballistic missiles. Just as disturbingly, a North Korean statement on last week's atom bomb test says the outcast country can produce "at will, and as many as it wants, a variety of smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear warheads of higher strike power."

The Kim regime's intercontinental ballistic missile capability ambition is also nearly within grasp, with multiple tests of the three-stage Unha-3 missile, including the successful delivery of a payload into space in December 2012. While it is unclear whether the Unha-3 is presently capable of accurately delivering a warhead to Alaska or the U.S. West Coast, which includes the technological challenge of a nuclear-tipped warhead's fiery plunge into the Earth's atmosphere from space, the Russians proved with Sputnik in 1957 that the ability to place satellites in orbit is a relatively small technological step away from launching nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles.

According to North Korea state news agency Rodong Sinmun, these images show a successful test of a submarine-launched ballistic missile in August 2016. The North American Aerospace Defense Command confirmed and assessed the missile's 300-mile trajectory, which was tracked from the North Korean coast east toward Japan. /Image via CNN

The maturation of North Korea's nuclear weapons program begs an existential question: How do you contain a rogue totalitarian regime that is capable of incinerating the cities of its regional neighbors and half the world? The containment policy that most of the international community has relied upon for more than half a century to limit the North Korean regime's threat to the rest of humanity is on the verge of collapsing.

The governments of regional and world powers such as China, Japan, Russia and the United States can either rise to this challenge, or humanity will slip back into the nuclear-weapons-fueled terror of The Cold War.

/BBC graphic and Geoeye image

Bullwork of democracy never rests

North Korea hacks Sony, November 2014 - January 2015

With the launching of a blatant cyber attack on Sony over the release of "The Interview," Kim Jong-un's regime revealed its greatest weakness: the truth.

North Korea took a significant risk hacking Sony, weighing exposure of the country's cyber warfare capabilities against the threat to Jong-un's cult of personality. The inevitable retaliation from abroad was a built-in bonus for the pariah country's Stalinist government.

ISIS poses grave threat

The aftermath of George W. Bush's war in Iraq was always a matter of how bad the outcome would be for the United States and the Middle East. This is about as bad as it gets.

The most prescient critics of the Iraq War compared the U.S.-led invasion to plunging a fist into a hornets nest. Now, Iraq is a nearly failed state, with a dysfunctional army; Iran is ascendant; and the region is buzzing with violence and reeling under the crushing weight of religious extremism reminiscent of The Crusades.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, aka Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, is so vicious that even disgraced Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is a palatable partner in the fight to defeat them. Mass executions and immolation of prisoners are never good hallmarks of social movements.

Rudy Giuliani plays with weapon of mass political destruction

It's like the script to an apocalyptic science-fiction movie about a society developing weapons of mass destruction that careen out of control. Republican should be careful what they ask for, they just might get it.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani beat the lowest drum of Republican politics last week, accusing President Obama of lacking love for his country and harboring hostile intent in his heart for America because of his upbringing.

Socialism reality check: Obama has been as friendly to Wall Street as any Republican president. The Hawaii native let the perpetrators of the 2008 financial meltdown skate.

North Korean threat still priority in DC, Seoul, Tokyo

U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel's tough talk over the weekend about Chinese cyber warfare capabilities grabbed headlines around the world. But Hagel and military leaders from Japan and South Korea also took a hardline stance on North Korea's "provocations." /AP photo via wbur.org

North Korea has yet again fallen off the radar screen at most mainstream media outlets. But the Hermit Nation's totalitarian regime is still very much on the mind of officials in Washington, Seoul and Tokyo.

The Pentagon released a pair of prepared statements over the weekend after U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel met with his counterparts in South Korea and Japan.

Here's the full text of Pentagon Press Secretary George Little's prepared statement on Hagel's meeting with South Korean Minister of Defense Kim Kwan-jin:

"U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Republic of Korea Minister of Defense Kim Kwan-jin met June 1 during the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore.
 
"Secretary Hagel and Minister Kim discussed the security situation on the Korean peninsula, the advancement of the U.S.-ROK Alliance and the importance of trilateral security cooperation with Japan. They discussed the North Korea threat and agreed that enhanced collaboration to deter further provocations was necessary. They also discussed the need to upgrade Alliance capabilities in the coming years.

"The two defense leaders agreed that the U.S.-ROK Alliance is one of the most [successful in] modern history, and that it must be further strengthened in light of the North Korean threat and other regional and global security challenges."

Here are excerpts from a "joint statement" the Pentagon released after Hagel had trilateral meetings with Kim Kwan-jin and Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera:

"The three ministers expressed their common view that North Korea's nuclear and missile program and continued acts of provocation, including a long-range ballistic missile launch in December 2012 and a nuclear test in February 2013, are serious threats that undermine not only the peace and stability of the Korean Peninsula but also those of Northeast Asia and around the world.

"The three ministers strongly called for North Korea to comply with the obligations pursuant to United Nations Security Council resolutions 1718, 1874, 2087, and 2094, including the abandonment of all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear program, and they emphasized the importance of the steadfast implementation of the resolutions. Additionally, the three ministers expressed their support for the UNSC resolutions, in which the UNSC expresses its determination to take further significant measures in the event of [an] additional North Korean missile launch or nuclear test. The three ministers affirmed that they will continue their collaboration to deter North Korean threats of nuclear and missile development and further provocative acts."

North Korean overture: Concession or mood swing?

 

The three-stage rocket tested by North Korea in December 2012 could be capable of delivering a warhead to Alaska or the West Coast of the United States. /Photo via AP

Whether North Korea is responding to pressure from its only ally or Kim Jong-un is repeating the bipolar diplomacy of his father and grandfather, Pyongyang has taken a step back from the brink of war.

On Friday, May 25, a North Korean envoy told Chinese President Xi Jinping that Pyongyang was willing to "take positive actions" to restart the six-party aid-for-disarmament talks that collapsed in 2008, China's state-run Xinhua news service reported.

"North Korea is willing to make joint efforts with all parties to appropriately resolve related issues through multilateral dialogue and consultations like the six-party talks, and maintain peace and stability on the peninsula," Kim's special envoy, Choe Ryong-hae, told Xi.

While this change in North Korea's tone is a welcome development after months of saber-rattling, Choe made no mention of negotiating nuclear disarmament, which has become the key sticking point for the United States, South Korea and many other members of the international community.

In an interview with Reuters, North Korea expert Cai Jian of Fudan University in Shanghai summed up the continuing thermonuclear impasse brilliantly: "The U.S. says if North Korea doesn't clearly renounce its nuclear program, it won't return to the six-party talks. But if the international community doesn't hold peace talks with North Korea, then North Korea will use that time to develop its nuclear weapons and missiles."

Orwell fiction reveals facts about North Korea

/Image via www.bite.ca

I wish George Orwell was still alive to provide the world with an insightful analysis of Kim Jong-un and the totalitarian North Korean government. It should come as no surprise that the quotes below from Orwell's masterpieces, 1984 and Animal Farm, are as revealing about the Hermit Nation as anything you will read, hear or see in the media today.

The Korean Workers' Party is nearly a mirror image of the humanity-crushing Party described in 1984: The state has a monopoly on information, a cult of personality helps keep the government's leader in power, citizens are constantly whipped into a frenzy of fear over attack from foreign invaders, and anyone who dares to dissent or defect runs the risk of persecution as a political prisoner.

From 1984:

• Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain.
• The three slogans of the Party:
  WAR IS PEACE
  FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
  IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
• Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.
• We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
• The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering—a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons—a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting—three hundred million people all with the same face.

From Animal Farm:

• All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
• It had become usual to give Napoleon the credit for every successful achievement and every stroke of good fortune. You would often hear one hen remark to another, “Under the guidance of our leader, Comrade Napoleon, I have laid five eggs in six days” or two cows, enjoying a drink at the pool, would exclaim, “thanks to the leadership of Comrade Napoleon, how excellent this water tastes!"
• They had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes.

History points to dire danger on Korean peninsula

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un strikes a heroic pose. His grandfather, Kim Il-sung, was one of the longest-serving national leaders of the 20th century, taking the helm of North Korea from its inception in 1948 and keeping a firm grip on power until his death in 1994. "The Great Leader" created a pervasive cult of personality in North Korea, forming the basis of a Kim dynasty that has endured for more than six decades. /image via blogs.canoe.ca


The North Korean crisis is proof that history is not only interesting but also critically important to guiding world leaders through perilous times.

The drama that has played out on the Korean peninsula over the past 65 years appears to be entering its final act. It's a tragedy of epic proportions, filled with high stakes as well as variously colorful and doomed characters. Here are some of the key episodes to keep in mind as we await the likely explosive finale:

• In one of the biggest diplomatic blunders of the Cold War, the Russian delegation boycotted the United Nations Security Council in 1950 during debate over sending international troops to stop Pyongyang from forcefully reuniting the Korean peninsula. Without the Russians present to cast a veto, the Security Council authorized intervention, and the Korean War began.
• After literally turning the tide with a bold amphibious landing at Inchon in September 1950, legendary U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur went rogue. The commander of the U.N. forces pressed his troops across the 38th parallel, the demarcation line established at the end of World War II that cut the Korean peninsula in half: the North allied with the Russians and the South in the American camp. MacArthur then went a step too far, threatening to cross into China to attack North Korean bases even though President Harry Truman had ordered him to avoid provoking the Chinese from entering the war. On October 25, 1950, about 100,000 Chinese troops crossed into North Korea, the U.N. forces suffered a series of setbacks and MacArthur pressured Truman to launch nuclear weapons strikes. Truman relieved MacArthur of command in April 1951.
• The entry of China into the war ultimately led to stalemate. The Armistice Agreement that has maintained an uneasy peace on the Korean peninsula was signed in July 1953.
• While MacArthur suffered a spectacular fall from grace during the Korean War, the North Korean leader, Kim Il-sung, emerged as one of the most formidable national leaders of the 20th century. When Nikita Krushchev launched a series of reforms in the Soviet Union in 1956, Kim Il-sung ditched the Russians and alligned North Korea with China and its more virulent strain of Communism. The North Korean leader cemented his power by establishing a cult of personality that was later inherited by his son, Kim Jong-il, and grandson, Kim Jong-un. "The Great Leader," who died in 1994, ultimately outlived six South Korean presidents, seven Soviet leaders and 10 U.S. presidents.
• The first detailed accounts North Korean concentration camps emerged after the defections of a camp guard and a camp security chief in the mid-1990s. In 2004, Kwon Hyok, who had served as security chief for Camp 22 in the northeast of the country, was interviewed for a report in The Telegraph. Kwon Hyok described a system of prison camps modeled after the Soviet Union's gulags. He said the camps were filled with not only political prisoners but also generations of their kin serving life sentences of collective punishment. Kwon Hyok said water torture, hanging torture and public executions were commonplace in Camp 22. "The most unforgettable scene I remember was when I watched an entire family being killed," he said of gas chambers where chemical experiments were conducted on prisoners. "They were put inside the chamber and I saw them all suffocate to death. The last person to die was the youngest son, who was crying for his parents and eventually died."
• Kim Jong-il followed in The Great Leader's footsteps, and Kim Jong-un is on the same path. In 2009, the North Korean constitution was amended to refer to Kim Jong-il as "Supreme Leader."
• The North Korean nuclear weapons program was launched under Kim Jong-il to raise the country's prestige and boost its bargaining power on the world stage. In 2005, Kim Jong-il declared North Korea had joined the Nuclear Club, and a spokesman for his foreign ministry said, "We have produced nuclear weapons to defend ourselves and to oppose the increasingly obvious intentions of the (George W.) Bush administration. The current reality proves that powerful strength is needed to preserve justice and truth." To squelch dissent, the Supreme Leader also mastered the technique of alarming the North Korean citizenry over the spectre of a U.S.-led invasion. Kim Jong-un was placed in charge of the drive to develop nuclear bombs before his father's death in December 2011.
• It's hard to tell what superlative Kim Jong-un will adopt as his moniker, but he has clearly adopted his father's vision of a nuclear-armed North Korea extracting concessions from the international community in general and the United States in particular.

There are several sobering lessons and conclusions to draw from North Korea's history.

First, it would be a terrible mistake to underestimate the latest heir to the Kim dynasty. Kim Jong-un has not deviated from wielding the same levers of power his grandfather and father perfected. The Kim cult of personality is as strong as ever. The rhetoric and threats directed at the United States and South Korea have reached alarming proportions. And satellite imagery indicates an expansion of the North Korean gulags since Kim Jong-il's death.

Second, it's going to be extremely difficult to drive a big enough diplomatic wedge between North Korea and China to bring any kind of meaningful regime change to Pyongyang. China remains as adverse as ever to instability at home and in its sphere of influence. Even as the Chinese leadership strives to play nice with the world community and take its place as an equal to the United States as a global superpower, the uncertainty and likely chaos that would follow the collapse of the Kim dynasty is unthinkable in Beijing.

Third, North Korea's successful tests of nuclear bombs and long-range rockets have raised the security stakes on the Korean peninsula immensely. Pyongyang's capability to reach out and touch U.S. bases and allies with nuclear weapons has torn a gaping hole in the decades-long diplomatic strategy of isolating North Korea from the rest of the world. The United States and its allies in the region, particularly South Korea and Japan, are on a collision course with North Korea that could result in a cataclysmic military confrontation at any moment.

Forecast for war clouds over Korean peninsula

The three-stage rocket North Korea tested in December is considered capable of delivering a warhead to Alaska. It is unlikely Pyongyang has perfected a nuclear device to place at the tip of the Taepodong-2 rocket ... yet. /Image via AP


The BBC has outstanding coverage of the increasing bellicose rhetoric and military maneuvers on the Korean peninsula. In addition to the breaking news from Moscow, where Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned this week that "we may simply let the situation slip out of our control and it will slide into a spiral of a vicious circle," there are several links to the following:

• Andrea Berger, a research fellow in nuclear analysis at the Royal United Services Institute, gives her assessment of the motivations behind Pyongyang's latest round of dire threats, including Thursday's announcement in the North Korean state-run media that leader Kim Jong-un has "judged the time has come to settle accounts with the U.S. imperialists."
• A report from Seoul detailing the heightened anxiety in the South Korean government and citizenry over North Korea's saber rattling.
• An analysis of the effectiveness of measures taken so far to constrain Pyongyang such as U.N. sanctions and joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises that have included flights of nuclear-capable U.S. warplanes this month over South Korea.
• And a dissection of North Korea's military capabilities to carry through on its threats against the United States and South Korea.

North Korea: Inaction in the face of genocide

This image was drawn by a concentration camp internee who escaped North Korea with help from Life Funds for North Korean Refugees, a nongovernmental organization based in Tokyo. /Image via robpongi.blogspot.com


The admissions of regret are as inevitable as the spring following the winter. Once the hideous enormity of genocide is laid bare for the entire world to see, international leaders who chose to do little or nothing at all to stop it emerge from their secure locations to explain their inaction and make shrill pronouncements of "never again."

Although few people outside Pyongyang know the exact figure, about 250,000 political prisoners are suffering and dying in North Korea's concentration camps. The handful of the doomed who have escaped these hell holes report that starvation, brutal living conditions and torture are the genocidal instruments of choice employed in the camps.

The day will come when the totalitarian regime that has governed North Korea for the past half century will be held to account for its crimes against humanity. After the survivors bear what is left of their souls, after the images of emaciated human forms flood the media, after a museum is erected in the vain hope that such cruelty can be averted for all time, politicians will step forward to ease our collective conscience with a slathering of well-chosen words.

One of the masters of apologetically explaining inaction in the face of genocide is President Bill Clinton.

During a visit to Rwanda in 1998, Clinton offered the following artfully crafted rhetoric in describing why he and other world leaders failed to answer the call when hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were slaughtered over the course of 100 days in 1994:

"The international community, together with nations in Africa, must bear its share of responsibility for this tragedy, as well. We did not act quickly enough after the killing began. We should not have allowed the refugee camps to become safe haven for the killers. We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide. We cannot change the past. But we can and must do everything in our power to help you build a future without fear, and full of hope.

"We owe to those who died, and to those who survived who loved them, our every effort to increase our vigilance and strengthen our stand against those who would commit such atrocities in the future here or elsewhere.

"Indeed, we owe to all the peoples of the world who are at risk because each bloodletting hastens the next as the value of human life is degraded and violence becomes tolerated, the unimaginable becomes more conceivable. We owe to all the people in the world our best efforts to organize ourselves so that we can maximize the chances of preventing these events. And where they cannot be prevented, we can move more quickly to minimize the horror.

"So let us challenge ourselves to build a world in which no branch of humanity, because of national, racial, ethnic, or religious origin, is again threatened with destruction because of those characteristics, of which people should rightly be proud. Let us work together as a community of civilized nations to strengthen our ability to prevent and, if necessary, to stop genocide."

North Korea has been committing genocidal acts on thousands, possibly millions, of its own citizens for decades. World leaders have done little to nothing to stop these crimes against humanity.

When will we rise to the challenge? When will we save our North Korean brothers and sisters from the same fate the Jews endured in the gas chambers, the Cambodians experienced in the killing fields and the Rwandans bore at the hands of machete-wielding thugs?

What too-little-too-late apology will we offer for our inaction?

Cyber warriors key asset in North Korean arsenal

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has reportedly strengthened the Hermit Nation's cyber warfare capability since his father's death in December 2011. Information technology security experts say cyber warfare is an attractive military and espionage option for North Korea because electronic attacks are difficult to trace and have the capacity to inflict widespread damage with a relatively low risk of retaliation. /Image via Reuters


The North Korean government has one of the strongest cyber warfare capabilities in the world, according to published reports over the past two years.

In June 2012, infosecisland.com reported:
- A North Korean defector revealed that the Hermit Nation had increased its cyber warfare personnel to 3,000 people
- Cyber warriors report directly to the country's top intelligence service, the General Reconnaissance Bureau
- U.S. Army Gen. James Thurman, commander of U.S. Forces in South Korea, believes North Korea is recruiting and forming highly skilled teams of hackers to engage in offensive cyber operations against hostile governments and conduct cyber espionage
- Lee Dong-hoon, a professor at the Korea University Graduate School of Information Security, ranks North Korea’s cyber warfare capabilities second only to Russia and the United States. "In North Korea, the state nurtures cyber (warfare) personnel to achieve military aims, and is capable of conducting various cyber attacks including denial of service and hacking," he said.
- In March 2011, a Pyongyang cyber warfare operation employed a South Korean operative to launch an electronic attack on computer systems at Incheon International Airport. The spy is accused of acquiring video games infected with malware from North Korean operatives during a trip to China

In May 2011, The Daily NK reported:
- A North Korean cyber warfare attack on Nonghyup Bank inflicted damage on "financial property of individual South Koreans"
- "It is possible and even likely that indiscriminate cyber attacks, which could cause more serious damage, may be launched in order to cause chaos in South Korean society. The reason for this is because the Internet is a much easier tool of attack" than more conventional military weapons
- A secret college North Korea formed in 1986 is churning out about 100 "world-class" hackers every year. Graduates are reportedly assigned as military officials at hacker units under the direction of the General Reconnaissance Bureau
- Pyongyang's cyber warriors are operating in China and other countries outside of the Korean peninsula to make it difficult to trace the true source of their electronic attacks
- Im Chae Ho, vice president of the KAIST Cyber Security Research Center in South Korea, told The Daily NK: "North Korea’s hackers apparently have ten times the strike capability of South Korea’s. North Korea is, furthermore, currently at a stage where it can directly attack South Korea's infrastructure through the use of cyber terrorism."

Pyongyang suspect in cyber attack on South Korea

A cyber attack has hit computer systems at television broadcasters and banks in South Korea. The TV broadcasters reported drawings of three skulls on a black background appeared on their computer screens after the attack. /Image via hdwpapers.com


A cyber attack this week on South Korean media companies and banks was likely launched from North Korea, according to several experts.

"This sort of mass scale attack is a planned organizational one, not by some hacker," Lim Jong-In, an information security professor at Korea University, told ABC News. "North Korea wants to show-off their strong arm without making human casualties. Their goal is to create instability here."

Computer networks at three South Korean television broadcasters and two banks were shut down in the cyber attack. It could take months to determine definitively whether North Korea was behind the hacking.

Last week, North Korean officials accused the United States and South Korea of attacking websites in Pyongyang.

B-52 flights send ominous signal to North Korea

The B-52 Stratofortress was a workhorse for the U.S. military during the Vietnam War, flying more than 126,000 bombing missions. The U.S. Air Force plans to fly updated versions of the long-range bomber until at least 2040. /Image via w3vietnam.org.nz


B-52 flights over the Korean peninsula and the strengthening of anti-missile defenses in Alaska are the latest steps in the deadly dance swirling around Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program.

Bloomberg and several other news agencies reported today that the U.S. bomber flights are intended to send a strong signal to North Korea that any nuclear strike launched from the Hermit Nation will be met with devastating force. "Just having the B-52 near the Korean peninsula and pass through means that the U.S. nuclear umbrella can be provided whenever necessary," a South Korean Defense Ministry spokesman told reporters in Seoul.

In service since 1955, the B-52 Stratofortress can be armed with a wide variety of conventional and nuclear weapons, including nuclear-tipped, air-to-ground missiles that have a range of more than 1,000 miles.

While Pentagon spokesman George Little called the B-52 flights "routine," he also said the Pentagon is sending a stern message to North Korea in response to its recent nuclear bomb test as well as threats against Washington and Seoul. "We are drawing attention to the fact we have extended deterrence capabilities that we believe are important to demonstrate in the wake of recent North Korean rhetoric," Little said.

In a clear sign that the ongoing showdown over Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions has far-reaching implications, China and Russia are bristling over U.S. plans to bolster the country's anti-missile defense capability in Alaska. On March 15, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced the shift of $1 billion from an anti-missile shield program in Europe to install 14 more missile interceptors in Alaska to address the growing nuclear threat from North Korea and Iran.

"Bolstering missile defenses will only intensify antagonism, and it doesn’t help to solve the issue," a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman said Monday.

Beyond stirring the pot of "antagonism" with North Korea, strengthening of the U.S. anti-missile capability in Alaska affects the global nuclear balance of terror. In the genocidal logic of superpower nuclear weapons strategy, the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction has been embraced in Moscow and Washington for decades. The MAD concept is as simple as it is horrific: You blow me up; I blow you up.

U.S. officials say missile interceptors are needed in Alaska to shoot down projectiles fired from North Korea and Iran. But they also could be used to shoot down Russian and Chinese nuclear missiles.

The B-52 Stratofortress was originally designed to drop nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union. It was the only aircraft capable of carrying the biggest nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal, a 10,000-pound thermonuclear device that could reduce an entire metropolitan area to rubble. The last B-53 bomb was built in 1962 and dismantled in 2011. /Image via AFP

North Korea: Heated rhetoric goes thermonuclear

In this image from North Korea's state-controlled Korean Central News Agency, troops train this week at an undisclosed location in the Hermit Nation. /Image via CNN


The North Korean leadership sounds like it's literally on the verge of going ballistic.

This week's U.N. Security Council vote to tighten sanctions against the Hermit Nation over the country's nuclear weapons program has unleashed a torrent of threats from Pyongyang. The global community has grown accustomed to the spitting of venon from North Korea, but this is different.

This is the newly nuclear-armed North Korea.

On Thursday, Kim Jong Un's regime threatened to unleash pre-emptive nuclear attacks on South Korea and the United States, vowing to turn Seoul and Washington into "seas of fire." Pyongyang's temper tantrum continued today, with breathless declarations on state-controlled media that a military hotline between the two Koreas was being severed and the 1953 armistice pact was being scrapped.

While few experts are predicting an imminent military confrontation, North Korea's possession of nuclear weapons has definitely changed the rules in the Korean Peninsula diplomacy playbook.

South Korea, which has historically tended toward restraint when responding to saber-rattling from the North, appears to be taking the threat of nuclear attack seriously. A South Korean Defense Ministry spokesman offered this blunt comment today: "If North Korea attacks South Korea with a nuclear weapon, Kim Jong-un's regime will perish from the Earth."

And seasoned North Korea experts seem unsettled, too. "I am taking this more seriously," said Daniel Snieder, a Korea specialist at Stanford University. "This is a notch up from anything we have seen before, really explicit threats that go beyond their normal overheated rhetoric."

North Korea: Concentration camp horrors

This image was drawn by a North Korean who escaped the country with help from Life Funds for North Korean Refugees, a nongovernmental organization based in Tokyo. /Image via robpongi.blogspot.com


The growing tensions over North Korea's nuclear weapons program are playing out on the international stage, but unknown thousands are struggling in anonymity to survive in the Hermit Nation's concentration camps.

This week, as President Obama and Japan's new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, pledged to pursue tougher actions at the U.N. Security Council over North Korea's recent missile and nuclear bomb tests, two escapees from North Korean concentration camps shared their stories at a human rights conference in Geneva.

"People think the Holocaust is in the past, but it is still very much a reality. It is still going on in North Korea," Shin Dong Hyuk told The Japan Times in a story published Friday.

Shin was born in Camp 14, one of five known concentration camps in North Korea. The 30-year-old escaped from the camp seven years ago, when he and another prisoner made a dash to a high-voltage security fence. The other internee was electrocuted; Shin escaped to China by scrambling over the dead man's body.

The Times reported as many as 200,000 North Koreans are enduring torture and starvation in the camps. But no one outside of the isolated country knows the total number of prisoners for sure because the repeated attempts of human rights organizations to extract information about the camps from Pyongyang have been rebuffed or ignored.

Here are some excerpts from the Times report:

"While Shin’s comparison with Nazi concentration camps, where the majority of the 6 million Jews who perished during the Holocaust were murdered, may seem extreme, another camp survivor, Chol Hwan Kang, agreed with the analogy.

"'Fundamentally, it is the same as Hitler’s Auschwitz,' Chol said, referring to one of the Nazi era’s most notorious death camps.

"With whole families in North Korea thrown into camps together and starving to death, he said that the 'methods may be different, but the effect is the same.'

"Chol, now 43, was sent to Camp 15 with his whole family when he was 9 years old to repent for the suspected disloyalties of his grandfather. He spent 10 years there before his family was released and later managed to flee to China and later to South Korea — the same route taken by Shin." ...

"After meeting Shin and hearing his harrowing account in December, U.N. human rights Commissioner Navi Pillay called for an in-depth international inquiry into 'one of the worst, but least understood and reported, human rights situations in the world.'" ...

"Shin, who says his father and grandfather were sent to the camp because two of his uncles apparently defected to South Korea, said he was expected to spend his entire life in them under a system that calls for up to three generations of family members of an accused to also be punished.

"'The birth of a baby is a blessed thing in the outside world, but inside the camp, babies are born to be slaves like their parents. It’s an absolute scandal,' Shin said.

"Both Shin and Chol described life in the camp as defined by hunger and violence.

"'Daily I saw torture, and every day in the camp I saw people dying of malnutrition and starvation. I saw lots of friends die and I almost died myself of malnutrition,' Chol recalled.

"Shin still carries the scars of his experience on his body. Resting his right hand on the table in front of him, he revealed the missing tip of his middle finger, which he says was chopped off by a prison guard as punishment after he dropped a piece of machinery in a factory."

China enabling North Korean nuclear ambitions

North Korea tests a three-stage rocket in December 2012. The launch drew international condemnation because it is widely viewed as an attempt to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles tipped with nuclear warheads. /Image via AP


Only China can peacefully compel the North Koreans to drop their quest for a nuclear weapons arsenal but that's unlikely to happen.

From the Chinese government's perspective, maintaining the status quo is clearly in its interest compared to the alternatives:
- With the Obama administration seeking to bolster the U.S. military, diplomatic and economic presence in Asia, China probably won't do anything significant to undercut its North Korean ally.
- Any effort to force North Korea to scuttle its nuclear weapons program bears a high risk of armed conflict, which would surely be frowned upon in Beijing. No country wants to see a war break out on its doorstep, particularly a conflict in which other nations are calling the shots.
- Tightening of U.N. sanctions against North Korea could destabilize Kim Jong-un's regime, and Beijing has long feared the consequences of a North Korean government collapse, including a flood of refugees pouring over the Yalu River into China.

If China won't stop North Korea from becoming a fully fledged member of the Nuclear Club, who will?

North Korea: Big claim about mini-nuclear bomb

North Korea claims the nuclear bomb it tested today was a miniaturized device and produced the largest explosive yield of the three nuclear tests it has conducted so far. South Korean officials estimate the bomb was about half as destructive as the first bomb the United States dropped on Japan in August 1945.

If this atomic bomb was truly a miniaturized device designed as part of Pyongyang's intercontinental missile program, North Korea has taken a leap toward establishing a credible nuclear threat to its regional neighbors and the United States. Paired with the three-stage rocket tested in December, the Hermit Nation could deliver a miniaturized atomic bomb to Japan or Australia with ease. If that rocket can be upgraded, the U.S. West Coast will be within reach.

North Korea ramps up anti-U.S. propaganda

Taking another page out of the George Orwell playbook, North Korea's latest propaganda video posted on YouTube shows a U.S. city in flames, presumably after a missile attack from the Hermit Nation.

In Orwell's brilliant novel exposing how totalitarian governments crush the human spirit, "1984," one of the ways regimes maintain control over their people is through propaganda designed to keep citizens constantly in fear of war with foreign aggressors. For decades, the North Korean government has whipped up hysteria over a supposedly looming conflict with the United States and a mother of all battles to reunify the Korean Peninsula.

North Korea and Iran on paths to destruction

North Korean troops on parade equipped with rocket propelled grenades. /Image via nytimes.com


Nuclear war clouds are forming over North Korea and Iran.

Both countries are at the heart of dangerous scenarios of immovable object vs. overwhelming force. Pyongyang and Tehran are firmly committed to their nuclear weapons programs as cornerstones of their foreign and domestic policies. But The United States, South Korea and Japan are reaching the breaking point on their tolerance of North Korea's pursuit of a fully equipped nuclear arsenal. And Israel views an Iranian nuclear bomb as a clear and present threat to its existence.

With the warning signs of warfare on a grand scale so clear, it's helpful to recall wisdom about war from two of its greatest students, Italian political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli and Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu. Here are some relevant offerings from Sun's "The Art of War" (written around 500 BC) and Machiavelli's "The Prince" (1505):

Sun Tzu: "The Art of War"

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

“There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.”

“All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.”

“To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”

“There are roads which must not be followed, armies which must not be attacked, towns which must not be besieged, positions which must not be contested, commands of the sovereign which must not be obeyed.”

“Foreknowledge cannot be gotten from ghosts and spirits, cannot be had by analogy, cannot be found out by calculation. It must be obtained from people, people who know the conditions of the enemy.”

Niccolo Machiavelli: "The Prince"

"A prince ought to have no other aim or thought, nor select anything else for his study, than war and its rules and discipline; for this is the sole art that belongs to him who rules, and it is of such force that it not only upholds those who are born princes, but it often enables men to rise from a private station to that rank. And, on the contrary, it is seen that when princes have thought more of ease than of arms they have lost their states. And the first cause of your losing it is to neglect this art; and what enables you to acquire a state is to be master of the art. ...

"But to exercise the intellect the prince should read histories, and study there the actions of illustrious men, to see how they have borne themselves in war, to examine the causes of their victories and defeat, so as to avoid the latter and imitate the former; and above all do as an illustrious man did, who took as an exemplar one who had been praised and famous before him, and whose achievements and deeds he always kept in his mind, as it is said Alexander the Great imitated Achilles, Caesar Alexander, Scipio Cyrus. ... A wise prince ought to observe some such rules, and never in peaceful times stand idle, but increase his resources with industry in such a way that they may be available to him in adversity, so that if fortune chances it may find him prepared to resist her blows."

North Korea vows nuclear test 'targeted' at U.S.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un speaks in Pyongyang in this image released by North Korea's state-run KCNA news agency on Dec. 22. /Image via Reuters


The international community has come to expect scary threats from North Korea, particularly when the country's totalitarian regime is criticized or sanctioned. But Pyongyang's reaction to this week's U.N. Security Council resolution, which tightens sanctions over the insular nation's nuclear weapon and missile programs, is extreme even by North Korean standards.

While there's plenty of customary bluster to be found in statements reported today by North Korea's state-run news media, there's also a stunning admission. For decades, Pyongyang has claimed that its nuclear program is geared to develop energy plants to generate electricity, which is in short supply or nonexistent across the entire country. North Korea abandoned that ruse today.

In announcing plans to conduct the country's third test of a nuclear bomb, the North Korean National Defense Commission said, "We are not disguising the fact that the various satellites and long-range rockets that we will fire and the high-level nuclear test we will carry out are targeted at the United States."

In other words, the North Korean regime has admitted its determination to build intercontinental ballistic missiles tipped with nuclear warheads capable of hitting the United States.

Since the suspension of the Korean War nearly 60 years ago, the North Korean government has used the spectre of a U.S.-led invasion as a prime tool to control and subjugate its citizenry. The international community's standard response to this constant source of diplomatic aggravation has amounted to containment, keeping Pyongyang in a tight little box and hoping for some path to North Korean regime change or reunification with South Korea.

The game is changing. And probably sooner rather than later, the containment playbook isn't going to work anymore.

Ominous turn on path to nuclear-armed North Korea

North Korea tests a ballistic missile in December 2012. The three-stage rocket could be capable of delivering a warhead to Alaska or the West Coast of the United States. /Image via AP


The path to a nuclear-armed North Korea took another turn this week, with the U.N. tightening sanctions and threatening "to take significant action in the event of a further launch or nuclear test," and North Korea in turn threatening new nuclear tests.

North Korean saber-rattling at any provocation should be expected, as should Pyongyang's continued drive to develop ballistic missiles tipped with nuclear warheads. The most significant action of this latest showdown between North Korea and the international community is China agreeing to sign Tuesday's U.N. resolution. What, if anything, China will do if North Korea builds nuclear missiles is hard to predict. But in this round of the diplomatic sparring match over North Korea's nuclear capabilities, the Chinese have strengthened the hand of countries that are trying to block its longtime ally's top military ambition.

This global security flashpoint is getting hotter and hotter.