Impoverished North Korea might resort to selling weapons-grade plutonium to terrorists for much-needed cash and that would be "disastrous for the world," the top US military commander in South Korea said yesterday.
General Leon LaPorte said the communist state may have harvested plutonium from a pool of 8,000 spent nuclear rods, which experts say could yield enough material for several atomic bombs.
The North's intent was a mystery, but "from the military stand point, they do have a capability that we must address," LaPorte told a forum in Seoul.
"And there is concern that North Korea, in its desire for hard currency, would sell weapons-grade plutonium to some terrorist organizations," he said. "That would be disastrous to the world."
US officials have already designated the isolated and impoverished North as a key proliferator of missiles, missile technology and other military hardware. The country says it has the right to sell missiles for cash but is willing to stop doing so if the US offers economic compensation.
Since last year, the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the US have held three rounds of talks aimed at curbing North Korea's nuclear ambitions, but no breakthrough has been reported.
A fourth round slated for September failed to go ahead because North Korea refused to attend.
North Korea has recently threatened to strengthen its "nuclear deterrent" to counter what it calls a US plot to launch a nuclear war against it.
It said it will return to nuclear talks when Washington drops a "hostile" policy toward the North. It seeks economic aid and US guarantees of nonaggression in return for giving up its nuclear desire.
In early 2003, North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. It has since said it completed reprocessing its 8,000 spent fuel rods. In September, a North Korean diplomat claimed that the country "weaponized" the nuclear fuel.
South Korean officials said North Korea was believed to have enough plutonium for two or three bombs. Some 33,000 US soldiers are based in South Korea -- a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended without a peace treaty.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema