North Korea will never give up its nuclear ambitions - US General

[Lankan Ranger]

North Korea will never give up its nuclear ambitions - US General

The reclusive communist regime in North Korea will not abandon its nuclear program under any circumstances, the commander of U.S. forces on the Korean peninsula said.

"I do not see that he [N. Korean leader Kim Jong-il] will give up his nuclear capability," Gen. Walter Sharp told U.S. lawmakers on Tuesday during hearings on Pentagon's budget for 2012 fiscal year.

"I think it is clear that Kim Jong-il believes he has to have it for regime survival," Sharp said adding that the U.S. military should maintain a strong presence on the Korean peninsula to stave off any threats to stability in the region.

The United States has kept a large military contingent in South Korea since the Korean War ended in an uneasy truce in 1953, and about 37,000 troops are currently stationed there.

North Korea is banned from conducting nuclear or ballistic missile tests under UN Resolution 1718, adopted after Pyongyang's first nuclear test on October 9, 2006.

However, the country carried out a second nuclear test on May 25, 2009, followed by a series of short-range missile launches, and has threatened to build up its nuclear arsenal to counter what it calls hostile U.S. policies.

The six-party talks on Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions involving the two Koreas, China, the United States, Russia and Japan came to a halt in April 2009 when North Korea walked out of negotiations to protest the United Nations' condemnation of its missile test.

N. Korea will never give up its nuclear ambitions - U.S. general | World | RIA Novosti

 

[below_freezing]

No sh*t. Might as well make north korea's air defenses strong enough to deter the US and sell them HQ-9s and J-10s in exchange for iron ore.

The most dangerous thing is North Korea being weak enough that the US decides being nuked is an acceptable cost for wiping North Korea off the map.

 

[gambit]

NKR will be wiped off the map. So will SKR after the SKReans overran the NKRean half starved soldiers.

 

[Skull and Bones]

The most dangerous thing is North Korea being weak enough that the US decides being nuked is an acceptable cost for wiping North Korea off the map.

This seems a bit far fetched idea to me.

 

[Raja.Pakistani]

Why North Korea should give up its nuclear ambitions when USA don't

 

[Lankan Ranger]

South Korean Armed Forces is one of the largest standing armed forces in the world with a reported personnel strength of 3,853,000 in 2010 (653,000 active force & 3,200,000 regular reserve)

South Korea doesn’t want a military conflict with North Korea because South Korea always wanted a stable economic growth.

Anyway if North Koran forces cross the LOC without permission, then North Korea will learn about modern South Korean Armed Forces.

 

[below_freezing]

And the South will learn alot about how nuclear fission works. Any South Korean family that can afford it, sends their child overseas, anywhere overseas, just to avoid the draft. Japan, US, China, Canada, Australia... anywhere. Otherwise MPs drag them away.

 

[Tractor]

Actually no one afraid nukes because it is just like moon will clash to earth no one believe.

 

[Chinese-Dragon]

Even the USA doesn't want to attack a nuclear armed country.

Look what happened during the Georgian war in 2008, when Russia entered the conflict. America just backed off, and went away.

The North Korean nuclear weapons have saved them from an invasion.

 

[gambit]

NKR will collapse on its own. It was the combined SKR/US alliance that deterred the starving NKR from invading the South.

 

[ZhengHe]

NKR will collapse on its own. It was the combined SKR/US alliance that deterred the starving NKR from invading the South.

Correction: North Korea did in fact invade. Your statement is false; just like everything else you say, except for the occasional facts about cooling systems or whatever hell you said you were an expert at.

Off topic: It was the combined NKR/China alliance that deterred SKR/US/NATO from taking over the North.

On topic: North Korea will give up its nuclear power when the US does. Sounds fair.

 

[Tractor]

Why NATO and US did not and are not going to invade is that NK really has many fun sources enjoyed by them in their view.

 

[nightcrawler]

DefenceDog: Russia Eyes Bigger Role on North Korea Issue

Moscow came to the conclusion that the Pyongyang rulers were unreliable, not fit to be partners. Also, North Korea is simply dangerous: Its missiles once flew into Russia's economic zone; its military provocations against the South threaten to start a war, possibly with nuclear overtones, close to Russia's borders.

 

[Hafizzz]

This is what North Korea told Libya :

Nuclear Weapons and the Libyan Intervention
Commentary: Nuclear Weapons and the Libyan Intervention | The National Interest

As he faces the US-NATO onslaught in the weeks ahead, will Muammar Qaddafi conclude that he made a disastrous mistake when he gave up his nuclear weapons program in 2003 in return for Bush administration promises of aid and improved relations?

An official from North Korea says he clearly did, and “it is now being fully exposed before the world that Libya’s ‘nuclear dismantlement,’ much touted by the U.S. in the past, turned out to be a mode of aggression, a way of coaxing the victim with sweet words to disarm itself and then to swallow it up by force.”

Qaddafi is not likely to agree with the North Koreans because he knows that, in reality, his nuclear program was not as far advanced as he had pretended, and he had lost confidence that it would ever succeed. As Mohammed ElBaradei, former director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, observed, Libya’s nuclear effort was “in the very initial stages of development when it was discontinued” and was, in fact, beset by major technical difficulties. To be sure, Qaddafi tried to avoid these issues by buying parts for a uranium enrichment plant through the smuggling network operated by Pakistan’s nuclear czar A.Q. Khan, but Khan proved able to supply only 15 percent of the required parts. As David Albright has shown in definitive detail, Libya did not have the technology needed to make the rest of the parts itself.

Adding to Qaddafi’s disenchantment with his prospects for actually developing an operational nuclear capability was a compelling reality: he was in serious domestic trouble and badly needed the economic quid pro quos offered by the United States to stay in power. Economic distress had led to urban riots, two military coup attempts and an Islamist insurgency in the eastern provinces.

Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, completely ignores the limited progress of the Libyan nuclear effort in his simplistic argument that Qaddafi, eyeing the fate of Iraq, acted out of fear of a U.S. invasion.

Saddam Hussein, as it turned out, tried to make it look like he had nuclear weapons that he did not actually have mainly to frighten off Iran in the wake of the Iran-Iraq war with its horrendous casualties. This in turn produced alarm in Washington and Tel Aviv and the unintended consequence of a U.S. invasion.

The Iran-Iraq war was clearly the critical factor that initially accelerated the development of the nascent Iranian nuclear weapons program. But I learned on three recent visits to Tehran from key foreign-ministry and think-tank experts that Iran is not yet committed to acquiring a nuclear weapons capability.

Tehran accepts the logic of North Korea’s position up to point. It wants the world to know that it is capable of weaponizing, but it will stop short of doing so while pursuing a broad security bargain with the United States. Alaeddin Boroujerdi, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Majlis (Parliament), explicitly told me that “we do want to be able to weaponize to assert our sovereignty and our equality with other world powers, and we want you to know that clearly, but we also know that actually weaponizing would be crossing a dangerous red line.” Boroujerdi spelled out the factors that impel the Iranian nuclear effort: the desire for great power status, the nuclear threats posed not only by Israel but also by the United States, especially by its tactical nuclear weapons on aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf, and above all, the domestic political importance for the Ahmadinejad regime of the nuclear program as a nationalist rallying cry.

My visits to Tehran during the reign of the late Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi underlined the domestic political importance of the nuclear program even then. The Shah started the nuclear program as part of a broader effort to establish himself as a nationalist modernizer who would restore the position of regional preeminence that Tehran had intermittently enjoyed in earlier centuries. To erase his image as a CIA-installed U.S. puppet, the Shah continually appealed to Persian pride by evoking historical memories of past Persian empires and by developing ambitious military power projection capabilities. Ahmadinejad now does much the same—using the nuclear program as a means of securing his position at home and abroad.

The North Korean leadership, too, uses its nuclear weapons program both to bolster its domestic political prestige and to deter a U.S. attack. The United States pressed Pyongyang to give up its entire nuclear weapons capability at the outset of denuclearization negotiations, but it is precisely because Pyongyang recognized its deterrent value that it insists on a phased denuclearization process and criticizes Qaddafi for giving up his nuclear ambitions.

 

[Time Assassin]

Every nation on this World has rights to have Nukes unless ALL Nations calls for a Nuke-Free planet.