Posted on 11/26/2007 5:27:31 AM PST by TigerLikesRooster
Report: NKorea discussed chemical arms technology with Syria
AP - Monday, November 26
TOKYO - North Korean experts discussed how to load chemical weapons onto missiles when they met with officials in Syria during a secret visit to the country earlier this month, a Japanese newspaper said Monday.
Damascus invited the experts for their advice as part of Syria's drive to develop its short-range "Scud C" missiles, the conservative Sankei newspaper said, citing unidentified individuals familiar with Middle East affairs.
The testing has been halted since July after one of the surface-to-surface missiles exploded at a military complex near the northern city of Aleppo, the Sankei said in its Washington-datelined story.
The explosion took place at the site of a joint Iranian/Syrian project to fit short-range ballistic missiles with chemical warheads, according to Jane's Defense Weekly. Jane's cited Syrian defense sources as saying it happened during a test to fit a Scud C missile with a mustard-gas warhead when fuel caught fire at the production site.
The North Koreans gave the Syrians advice on using chemical weapon warheads during discussions on safety procedures and related matters, the Sankei said.
Western experts believe Syria has a stock of chemical weapons. However, Damascus has never acknowledged it has any weapons of mass destruction and has publicly called for ridding the Middle East of any such weapons.
North Korea, which has provided Syria with missile technology and support since the 1980s, has rebuffed all overtures to sign an international treaty banning chemical weapons.
Earlier this year, Israel launched an airstrike against a Syrian military installation that reportedly was a nuclear facility made with North Korean help.
Damascus denies it has an undeclared nuclear program, and North Korea has said it was not involved in any Syrian nuclear project.
Ping!
The AP is unreliable. The story is mostly a rehash of old FR threads
love to see syria launch a few chemicals at Israel.
Just to see the response.
Just ask the State Dept.
Meanwhile Bush and Condi have their negotiators trying to figure out how to make their “sows ear” attempt to keep the North Korean regime from imploding look like a “silk purse” of peaceful coexistence.
They worked so hard to set the date for their celebration and photo-op but their partner(Chia Head) dies on them. Imagine that! LOL.
????
Ping.
So, will this interfere with taking them off the terrorist list?
1) North Korea continues to be ROTTEN under Kim Jong il. Nothing has changed.
2) The New Bush Administration policy of "Appeasement" (not just with North Korea), replacing "Axis of Evil" and economic strangulation with threats of deep, bunker busting military strikes against the DPRK, SUCKS.
(Maybe they could do it before the huge statute of Kim il Sung on Mansudae Hill, though.)
Do chickens have lips??
This isn't literally a SCUD as we used to term them in NATO nomenclature, but one of several types resembling a SCUD in that you fire them and wherever they run out of fuel, they drop. If you're launching a zillion of them at a time at an artillery target that's not a big deal. If you're launching a few of them with poison gas aboard...well, call me silly but I'd sort of like to know where they're going to come down.
GW Bush is currently, and maybe irrevocably, infected with the Clinton disease, from which the infected President can toss aside principles, including their own, and long-term interests, including the nation’s on the narcissistic notion that their personal legacy is a higher priority than those things.
The first loss that occurs with this disease is that mere diplomacy on its own, stripped of external objectives, and agreements derived from such self-contained “diplomacy”, are found to be self-contained desirable objectives, in their own right, as if the actual objectives to which they must be subservient no longer matter. Any “diplomacy” and any so-called “agreement” derived from it is considered an improvement over the admission of a greater truth that our core intentions and objectives are not compatible. These are the kind of agreements from which the impetus for war is readily resurrected because they are divorced from the objectives needed to prevent it.
North Korea has conducted nuclear blackmail, not with intentions to attack South Korea, which they know would result in their own total annihilation, but from which to obtain, through geopolitical blackmail, the financial assistance to prevent the regime’s implosion. The Carter/Clinton /Halfbright deal of the 1990s saved the regime from imploding then with the assistance it provided, and now Bush is, in reality, in the process of an effort from which the greatest result will be the same - propping up (preventing the wholesale failure of) the North Korean regime. In terms of its ability to both sustain its supposed nuclear ambitions, or even just its military position itself, and to survive it is in a much more destitute and precarious position than has been any communist regime that failed before it.
The idea that without “an agreement” the North will, and will be able to, mount a sustainable attack on the south (where would it get the fuel alone) is a less likely proposition than was the ability to survive of Saddam’s military machine. The insane leaders of the north are not counting on a belief in their military capabilities except that we should have an inflated sense of such a belief and an inflated sense that they would attempt to employ them.
They must obtain U.S. full diplomatic recognition, including complete ease of US-North Korean as well as South Korean-North Korean economic intercourse and all that comes with it or they will implode. We need to let them implode, not save them, because after all those gifts they will remain as governmentally unchanged as they have been since the origins of the regime.
The one thing that Gorbachev realized towards the end of his negotiations with Reagan was that without what would later become Glasnost and Perestroika, there would be no agreement with Reagan. From all anyone has learned so far, GWB seeks only for the means from which saving the North Korean regime from its own suicidal demise can be explained away as a “victory”, for his legacy. Reagan he is not.
This poster (Wuli) is absolutely BRILLIANT.
Because you deserve it for your excellent analysis of the current dire situation.
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