Korea's uncertain nuclear future

퇴근 길에 라디오에서 뉴스로 들었습니다.

앞 부분은 잘 못듣고 뒤에 '김정은'이란 말이 나오길레 혹여 무슨일이 있구나 싶었는데

집에 돌오니 아내가 알려주네요.

뉴질랜드 언론에서도 관심을 가지고 계속 뉴스를 내보내는것 같습니다.

한국에 있으나 여기에 있으나 크게 흔들릴 만한 소식은 아니지만

당분간 북한과 남한을 중심으로 요동칠 한반도를 보니 편안한 마음은 아닙니다.

이번 일이 큰 문제없이 잘 지나가서

한반도 정세가 빨리 안정이 되기만을 바래봅니다.

... ...

AP통신 보도는 '북한핵' 중심입니다.

북한 중심이 아닌 미국중심에서 해석을 해놨네요.

혹여나 새로운 지도자 김정은이 북한핵을 통제할수 없는 상황에 이르게 되는건 아닌지 걱정을 하면서

미국의 역할을 강조하네요. ㅡㅡ;;

Korea's uncertain nuclear future

8:45 PM Monday Dec 19, 2011

The death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il could put a brake on talks ultimately aimed at getting the secretive communist state to give up its nuclear weapons.

Kim Jong Un, the supreme leader's untested third son and successor, is unlikely to risk any step that could be construed as weakness as he seeks to consolidate control.

Even before his father's death, the United States and others have said they viewed the power transition as a dangerous time when the ascendant Kim Jong Un could seek to demonstrate his leadership credentials through martial and provocative actions, such as a military attack on South Korea or a nuclear test.

Kim Jong Un was first brought into public view in September 2010, when his father put the 20-something in high-ranking posts. In power, he faces daunting challenges.

As the authoritarian dynasty enters its third generation, North Korea is struggling to feed its own people and has recoiled from reform of its struggling command economy. Despite rising trade and cooperation with chief foreign backer China, the nation's very future is in doubt.

"The most likely scenario for regime collapse has been the sudden death of Kim (Jong Il). We are now in that scenario," said Victor Cha, a former US National Security Council director for Asian affairs.

The White House's initial, brief reaction to the North Korean state media report of Kim Jong Il's death Saturday from a heart ailment emphasized regional security, saying that the US was in close touch with its allies, South Korean and Japan.

"We remain committed to stability on the Korean peninsula, and to the freedom and security of our allies," a statement said.

The Obama administration has taken a cautious path in dealing with North Korea over the past three years, since Pyongyang pulled out of six-nation aid-for-disarmament talks in 2009.

Shortly after the North announced its withdrawal, it conducted its second nuclear test, following its first in 2006.

In 2010, the North upped the ante even further.

In moves that some experts speculated was linked to Kim Jong Un's rise to power, a South Korean submarine was sunk and a South Korean island came under artillery fire seemingly unprovoked attacks within months of each other that left 50 people dead and almost pitched the heavily militarized Korean peninsula into war.

And underscoring the North's intent to develop its nuclear deterrent further, it unveiled a uranium enrichment facility that gave it a second way of generating fissile material to put in an atom bomb.

only in July 2011, when North-South tensions had eased, did the US revive direct negotiations with Pyongyang, a prelude to a possible resumption of the six-nation talks, that also include China, Japan, Russia and South Korea.

While there's little expectation that the North Korean regime would agree to give up its nuclear deterrent which it probably views as key to its very survival the US hopes that talks could help slow the weapons' development and discourage future provocations.

In the past five months, the diplomatic track has yielded little in the way of concrete results, but it has, at least, gathered some momentum.

Washington has held two rounds of exploratory talks and a third round appeared imminent. The US also appears ready to resume badly needed food aid that Pyongyang requested nearly a year ago. US officials discussed the monitoring of the possible assistance with North Korean officials during two days of meetings in Beijing last week.

While Washington would deny any connection, food aid could serve as a sweetener for getting the North to agree to terms for a resumption of the disarmament talks, such as a moratorium on nuclear and missile tests, and opening up its nuclear facilities to outside inspection.

But with Kim Jong Il's death, negotiations with the United States which retains about 28,000 troops across the border in South Korea are likely to be put on hold, as the North enters months of intense mourning for the Dear Leader, and rising uncertainty.

- AP

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North Korea leader Kim Jong Il dead

6:07 PM Monday Dec 19, 2011

Kim Jong Il, the mercurial and enigmatic North Korean leader whose iron rule and nuclear ambitions dominated world security fears for more than a decade, has died. He was 69.

Kim's death 17 years after he inherited power from his father was announced today by the state television from the North Korean capital, Pyongyang. The country's "Dear Leader" reputed to have had a taste for cigars, cognac and gourmet cuisine was believed to have had diabetes and heart disease.

North Korea has been grooming Kim's third son to take over power from his father in the impoverished nation that celebrates the ruling family with an intense cult of personality.

Kim's longtime pursuit of nuclear weapons and his military's repeated threats to South Korea and the US have stoked fears that war might again break out or that North Korea might provide weapons of mass destruction to terrorist movements.

South Korea put its military on "high alert" and President Lee Myung-bak convened a national security council meeting after the news of Kim's death. The two Koreas remain technically in a state of war more than 50 years after the peninsula's Cold War-era armed conflict ended in a cease-fire.

Kim is believed to have suffered a stroke in 2008 but he had appeared relatively vigorous in photos and video from recent trips to China and Russia and in numerous trips around the country carefully documented by state media.

Kim Jong Il inherited power after his father, revered North Korean founder Kim Il Sung, died in 1994. He had been groomed for 20 years to lead the communist nation founded by his guerrilla fighter-turned-politician father and built according to the principle of "juche," or self-reliance.

In September 2010, Kim Jong Il unveiled his third son, the twenty-something Kim Jong Un, as his successor, putting him in high-ranking posts.

Even with a successor, there had been some fear among North Korean observers of a behind-the-scenes power struggle or nuclear instability upon the elder Kim's death.

Few firm facts are available when it comes to North Korea, one of the most isolated countries in the world, and not much is clear about the man known as the "Dear Leader."

North Korean legend has it that Kim was born on Mount Paekdu, one of Korea's most cherished sites, in 1942, a birth heralded in the heavens by a pair of rainbows and a brilliant new star. Soviet records, however, indicate he was born in Siberia, in 1941.

Kim Il Sung, who for years fought for independence from Korea's colonial ruler, Japan, from a base in Russia, emerged as a communist leader after returning to Korea in 1945 after Japan was defeated in World War II.

With the peninsula divided between the Soviet-administered north and the U.S.-administered south, Kim rose to power as North Korea's first leader in 1948 while Syngman Rhee became South Korea's first president.

The North invaded the South in 1950, sparking a war that would last three years, kill millions of civilians and leave the peninsula divided by a Demilitarized Zone that today remains one of the world's most heavily fortified.

In the North, Kim Il Sung meshed Stalinist ideology with a cult of personality that encompassed him and his son. Their portraits hang in every building in North Korea and on the lapels of every dutiful North Korean.

Kim Jong Il, a graduate of Pyongyang's Kim Il Sung University, was 33 when his father anointed him his eventual successor.

Even before he took over as leader, there were signs the younger Kim would maintain and perhaps exceed his father's hard-line stance.

South Korea has accused Kim of masterminding a 1983 bombing that killed 17 South Korean officials visiting Burma, now known as Myanmar. In 1987, the bombing of a Korean Air Flight killed all 115 people on board; a North Korean agent who confessed to planting the device said Kim ordered the downing of the plane himself.

Kim Jong Il took over after his father died in 1994, eventually taking the posts of chairman of the National defence Commission, commander of the Korean People's Army and head of the ruling Worker's Party while his father remained as North Korea's "eternal president."

He faithfully carried out his father's policy of "military first," devoting much of the country's scarce resources to its troops even as his people suffered from a prolonged famine and built the world's fifth-largest military.

Kim also sought to build up the country's nuclear arms arsenal, which culminated in North Korea's first nuclear test explosion, an underground blast conducted in October 2006. Another test came in 2009, prompting UN sanctions.

Alarmed, regional leaders negotiated a disarmament-for-aid pact that the North signed in 2007 and began implementing later that year.

However, the process continues to be stalled, even as diplomats work to restart negotiations.

North Korea, long hampered by sanctions and unable to feed its own people, is desperate for aid. Flooding in the 1990s that destroyed the largely mountainous country's arable land left millions hungry.

Following the famine, the number of North Koreans fleeing the country through China rose dramatically, with many telling tales of hunger, political persecution and rights abuses that officials in Pyongyang emphatically denied.

Kim often blamed the US for his country's troubles and his regime routinely derides Washington-allied South Korea as a "puppet" of the Western superpower.

US President George W. Bush, taking office in 2002, denounced North Korea as a member of an "axis of evil" that also included Iran and Iraq. He later described Kim as a "tyrant" who starved his people so he could build nuclear weapons.

"Look, Kim Jong Il is a dangerous person. He's a man who starves his people. He's got huge concentration camps. And ... there is concern about his capacity to deliver a nuclear weapon," Bush said in 2005.

Kim was an enigmatic leader. But defectors from North Korea describe him as an eloquent and tireless orator, primarily to the military units that form the base of his support.

The world's best glimpse of the man was in 2000, when the liberal South Korean government's conciliatory "sunshine" policy toward the North culminated in the first-ever summit between the two Koreas and followed with unprecedented inter-Korean cooperation.

A second summit was held in 2007 with South Korea's Roh Moo-hyun.

But the thaw in relations drew to a halt in early 2008 when conservative President Lee Myung-bak took office in Seoul pledging to come down hard on communist North Korea.

Disputing accounts that Kim was "peculiar," former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright characterized Kim as intelligent and well-informed, saying the two had wide-ranging discussions during her visits to Pyongyang when Bill Clinton was US president.

"I found him very much on top of his brief," she said.

Kim cut a distinctive, if oft ridiculed, figure. Short and pudgy at 5-foot-3, he wore platform shoes and sported a permed bouffant. His trademark attire of jumpsuits and sunglasses was mocked in such films as "Team America: World Police," a movie populated by puppets that was released in 2004.

Kim was said to have cultivated wide interests, including professional basketball, cars and foreign films. He reportedly produced several North Korean films as well, mostly historical epics with an ideological tinge.

A South Korean film director claimed Kim even kidnapped him and his movie star wife in the late 1970s, spiriting them back to North Korea to make movies for him for a decade before they managed to escape from their North Korean agents during a trip to Austria.

Kim rarely traveled abroad and then only by train because of an alleged fear of flying, once heading all the way by luxury rail car to Moscow, indulging in his taste for fine food along the way.

one account of Kim's lavish lifestyle came from Konstantin Pulikovsky, a former Russian presidential envoy who wrote the book "The Orient Express" about Kim's train trip through Russia in July and August 2001.

Pulikovsky, who accompanied the North Korean leader, said Kim's 16-car private train was stocked with crates of French wine. Live lobsters were delivered in advance to stations.

A Japanese cook later claimed he was Kim's personal sushi chef for a decade, writing that Kim had a wine cellar stocked with 10,000 bottles, and that, in addition to sushi, Kim ate shark's fin soup a rare delicacy weekly.

"His banquets often started at midnight and lasted until morning. The longest lasted for four days," the chef, who goes by the pseudonym Kenji Fujimoto, was quoted as saying.

Kim is believed to have curbed his indulgent ways in recent years and looked slimmer in more recent video footage aired by North Korea's state-run broadcaster.

Kim's marital status wasn't clear but he is believed to have married once and had at least three other companions. He had at least three sons with two women, as well as a daughter by a third.

His eldest son, Kim Jong Nam, 38, is believed to have fallen out of favor with his father after he was caught trying to enter Japan on a fake passport in 2001 saying he wanted to visit Disney's Tokyo resort.

His two other sons by another woman, Kim Jong Chul and Kim Jong Un, are in their 20s. Their mother reportedly died several years ago.

- AP

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@ 위에 두 분 대통령이 좀 더 열심히 해서 통일의 물꼬를 확 텃어야 하는데...