North Korea, Nuclear Weapons, China And Why Nothing Will Change

On Friday September 9 North Korea conducted its fifth and largest nuclear weapons test to date.  This test follows the one in January.  In 1994 the Clinton administration discovered that North Korea was working towards the development and construction of a nuclear weapons arsenal.  President Clinton was given several options on best to proceed: One involved a military attack on the North's nuclear facilities and the other was finding a means which would lead to talks between the relevant countries.  What emerged was the Agreed Frame Work: North Korea would decommission its nuclear reactor capable of producing weapons grade material to be replaced with a reactor which would provide electrical power to be constructed by KEPCO

Dealings with North Korea while never easy, the Agreed Frame Work did achieve some semblance of stability on the Korean peninsula.  George W. Bush's election left uncertain the continuance of the last administrations policies or would they pursue their own policy.  In January of 2002 George W. Bush in his State of the Union speech which became as the Axis of Evil speech laid to rest any doubts on how his administration would deal with North Korea when in proclaimed a member of the axis of evil with Iraq and Iran.  With that, North Korea walked away from the talks and stayed away until the Six Party Talks.  These talks proceed in fits and starts finally ending in 2013 with very little achieved.

China was a party to these talks as it was thought, by being North Korea's main political backer they might have some influence over that governments negotiating parameters.  Even when China did apply political pressure it did so with little consequence as the North's government knew that Beijing wouldn't push so hard as to cause the government to collapse and that is the reason nothing will change.

China's communist leaders see a unified Korea as a direct threat to its national sovereignty believing correctly that the country would remain allied with the U.S. leaving  28,000 U.S. military personal on the peninsula.  Additionally any collapse would cause an immediate refugee crises with many North Koreans fleeing into Northeast China something that the government is loath to see that happen as they believe it would destabilize the wider region.    

Sure China's leaders are pissed off at that the North has once again gone the rabbit hole but they aren't going to push very hard to change the status quo.    




     

North Korea conducts 'fifth and biggest nuclear test'

What we know so far

There has been no official confirmation from North Korea about whether it conducted its fifth nuclear test today or not. But a lot of evidence points in that direction at the moment. Here’s what we know:

• A large earthquake of magnitude 5.3 was recorded near the North’s nuclear tests site at around 9.30am local time on Friday (1.30am BST), according to US, Chinese and Japanese monitors.
• The US Geological Survey described it as an explosion rather than a tremor.
• The epicentre of the tremor was at ground level, not below ground like most naturally occurring seismic events.
• Japan and South Korea have confirmed that it was a nuclear test.

North Korea is believed to have carried out its fifth and largest ever test of a nuclear device, say South Korean military officials.

It comes after an "artificial" magnitude 5.3 earthquake was detected close to its nuclear test site on Friday morning,

Previous artificial earthquakes in the same area and of that magnitude have all been nuclear tests.

There has been no comment from the North as yet.

In a statement carried by the Yonhap news agency, South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said: "We estimate the North has carried out the biggest-ever test."

It said the yield was estimated to have been 10 kilotonnes, almost twice the power of its last test in January. At that time the North said it had successfully tested a hydrogen bomb, but many analysts cast doubt on that claim.

Jeb's Got Turtles & Kim's Got Nukes (Maybe)

Every nuclear detonation from 1945 to the present day, visualised (video)

This week the world has been marking 70 years since the US dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Barack Obama - who won the Nobel peace prize in 2009 for advocating nuclear non-proliferation - and the nuclear deal he oversaw with Iran have put nuclear weapons to the forefront, and Labour leadership front-runner Jeremy Corbyn has pledged to scrap Trident if elected.

This all makes a new visualisation charting every nuclear explosion ever all the more haunting. From Orbital Mechanics, every single detonation (the video counts 2,153) is mapped, from the first US tests, the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombings, the 1961 Tsara Bomba - the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated, to the most recent nuclear explosion when North Korea conducted an underground test in 2009.