Norks' plutonium enough for 4 or 5 bombs

CNN:

Senior North Korean officials say the communist regime has "weaponized" its stockpile of plutonium, according to a U.S. scholar, in a move suggesting that North Korea may have significantly hardened its stance on nuclear negotiations.

Selig Harrison, one of the few U.S. scholars granted access to senior North Korean officials, said at a news conference in Beijing that the officials told him they had weaponized 30.8 kilograms of plutonium, enough for four or five warheads.

The director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy, who just returned from a five-day visit to Pyongyang, said senior North Korean officials told him the warheads will not be open for inspection.

If it is true, the news portends a gloomy outlook for the future of the six-party talks that began in 2003 with the goal of getting North Korea to end its nuclear program.

"It does change the game," Harrison said.

South Korea, the United States, Japan, China and Russia are participating in the talks.

A 2007 agreement calls for scrapping nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula in return for energy aid to the North, normalized relations between the North and the United States and Japan, and a formal peace pact.

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It appears that the North Koreans have been dealing in bad faith again. It is nothing new. The talks for the Norks are basically an exercise in extortion. The real question now is whether the Obama administration will cave to their demands and still get little of value.

The NY Times story on the announcement says it was accompanied by “all-out confrontational posture” with South Korea.

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After the threats on Saturday, South Korea ordered its military to heighten vigilance along the heavily fortified border with North Korea, according to a spokesman of the South Korean military joint chiefs of staff.

North Korea’s saber-rattling toward the South has increased in intensity since President Lee Myung-bak took office in Seoul a year ago, vowing to take a tougher stance on North Korea, reversing 10 years of his liberal predecessors’ efforts to engage the North with economic aid. But what made the threat on Saturday unusual, and more worrisome to some South Korean analysts, was the way it was delivered: in a statement read on North Korean television by a uniformed spokesman for the North’s joint chiefs of staff.

“Strong military measures will follow from our revolutionary armed force,” the spokesman, a colonel, said, according to Yonhap, South Korea’s national news agency, which monitors North Korean broadcasts.

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My speculation is that the Dear Leader may have died and the bellicosity was posturing to brace the North Korean population for the news. If that is the case, the leadership is probably feeling pretty insecure right now, or at least more so than their usual paranoia. Then again, it could be just another crude extortion attempt because their economy is slipping further into the abyss.

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