North Korea Going to Stage Nuclear Test

[Annie]

China indirectly warning NK, via what it lets out:

http://www.austinbay.net/blog/index.php

10/8/2006
Meanwhile, at the Chinese-North Korean border…
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* General

— site admin @ 9:59 am

StrategyPage and others have written about China’s border troubles with North Korea. Today the London Times publishes an informative and at times utterly graphic article. The article indicates China has deployed new military units in the border region.

Here’s the lede, and part of the more graphic description:

THE North Korean refugee had one request for her captors before the young Chinese soldiers led her back across the steel-girdered bridge on the Yalu River that divides two “socialist allies”.

“She asked for a comb and some water because she said that if she was going to die she could not face going to heaven looking as dirty and dishevelled as this,” recounted a relative of one soldier who was there.


What happened next is testimony to the rising disgust in Chinese military ranks as Beijing posts more troops to the border amid a crisis with North Korea over its regime’s plan to stage a nuclear test.

The soldiers, who later told family members of the incident, marched the woman, who was about 30, to the mid-point of the bridge. North Korean guards were waiting. They signed papers for receipt of the woman, who kept her dignity until that moment. Then, in front of the Chinese troops, one seized her and another speared her hand — the soft part between thumb and forefinger — with the point of a sharpened steel cable, which he twisted into a leash.

“She screamed just like a pig when we kill it at home in the village,” the soldier later told his relative. “Then they dragged her away.”

Such stories are circulating widely among Chinese on the border, where wild rumours of an American attack on nuclear test sites have spread fears of a Chernobyl-type cloud of radiation and sparked indignation at the North Koreans. “I’ve heard it a hundred times over that when we send back a group they stab each one with steel cable, loop it under the collarbone and out again, and yoke them together like animals,” said an army veteran with relatives in service.​

China has previously allowed Western reporters to visit the border area, but this is a particularly gritty report (more than the usual “we’ve a refugee problem up here”). I suspect China is letting reporters operate on a longer leash– hence the access to troops in the border region. This sends a message to Pyongyang.

The Chinese are worried about a potential influx of North Korean refugees. They are also vexed with counterfeit US currency coming from North Korea and (quote) “…vast quantities of fake Viagra from North Korea.”

Fake cash and fake drugs — the exports of a failed state seeking nuclear weapons.

Note the article’s last line — South Korea fears that –in the midst of a Chinese-North Korean military confrontation– China may take a slice of Korean territory. It’s happened before.

The sense that Kim’s regime is losing control lies behind the Chinese military buildup. But some South Korean MPs fear China could grab territory from the north in the event of a collapse.
​

Read the entire article.

I just heard a television report that North Korea is “reconsidering” its threat to test a nuclear weapon. Pyongyang wants face to face negotiations with the US in return for no detonation. This is an NoKo old demand,

and a gimmick. The propaganda gimmick: if the US declines face to face negotiations then the NoKo test is the result of the US refusal. If the US agrees then Kim’s regime touts it as a huge dimplomatic victory, won by threatening nuclear war. In six or eight months, Pyongyang will pull the same extortion gambit once again.



Pyongyang has a lot to reconsider. China and Japan are holding very serious talks in Beijing, talks the Chinese had called “a turning point” in Chinese-Japanese relations.

From the Bloomberg report:

Japan and China agreed to improve frayed relations and said North Korea must not test a nuclear weapon in newly elected Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s first visit to Beijing.

China’s President Hu Jintao and Abe agreed that North Korea must return to six-party talks aimed at aimed at dismantling the country’s arms program, a Japanese government official said. North Korea on Oct. 3 said it would test a nuclear bomb, prompting a unanimous United Nations Security Council resolution urging Kim Jong Il’s government to abandon its plan…​

Note China and Japan are insisting that North Korea return to the six party talks– in other words, they oppose North Korea’s demand for one on one talks with the US.