US President George W. Bush's chief negotiator with North Korea told a Senate panel on Tuesday that it was "quite possible" that the country had turned all 8,000 of its spent nuclear fuel rods into plutonium to fuel nuclear weapons.
The assessment by US Assistant Secretary of State for Asia James Kelly, the who just returned from an inclusive set of negotiations with the North Koreans in Beijing, left open the possibility that while the Bush administration has been conducting painstakingly slow negotiations with Pyongyang, the government there has made good on its threats to produce several new atomic bombs. But after the testimony, Kelly said that formal intelligence assessments of North Korea's arsenal had not changed, and "the operative phrase I used is `we don't know for sure.'"
Until Tuesday, the administration's public position has been that it believes North Korea, at worst, has turned only a portion of the spent fuel rods into nuclear fuel. The rods were under international inspection until New Year's Day 2003, when the North Korean government ordered the International Atomic Energy Agency's inspectors to leave the country. After that, the rods were moved from storage at Yongbyon, the country's main nuclear complex.
Ever since, US intelligence agencies have been wrestling with the question of how many rods have been reprocessed and how quickly North Korea's nuclear arsenal has grown. The country is believed to have produced one or two weapons in the early 1990s, during the administration of Bush's father. If it has now produced five or six more, as some intelligence officials estimate, that could create a far more difficult disarmament challenge: The North could hide several, and perhaps sell one or two, as it has periodically threatened to do.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
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