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North Korea is keeping nuclear program alive, officials say
Yahoo View•June 30, 2018
After President Trump’s historic summit with Kim Jong Un, more than a dozen U.S. intelligence officials tell NBC News that North Korea is pushing ahead with its nuclear program.
VIDEO @
https://www.yahoo.com/news/north-kor...154339784.html
Is it normal or even legal for "US intelligence officials" to be speaking with NBC news about their highly classified information? Are these the same "US intelligence officials" responsible for the Russia Hoax??!! I'd fire them all.
Openness, accountability, and honesty define government transparency.
In a free society, transparency is government's obligation to share information with citizens.
It is at the heart of how citizens hold their public officials accountable.
Government transparency - Ballotpedia
https://ballotpedia.org/Government_transparency
Lock up all of the leakers.
Donald Trump said on Sunday it was “possible” that a deal he claimed ended the nuclear threat posed by North Korea would not “work out”.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...y-not-work-out
- President tells Fox he did not make concessions to Kim Jong-un
- Trump in fact agreed to end military exercises with South Korea
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...y-not-work-out
A leading Senate foreign policy hawk, meanwhile, took a less diplomatic tone. Interviewed on NBC’s Meet the Press, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said North Korea would “regret it” if nuclear talks collapsed.
“I don’t want a war with North Korea,” Graham said. “The last best chance to avoid that war is a peaceful end to their nuclear program … if they don’t take it, and they play Trump like they’ve played everybody else, they’re going to regret it.”
I see, so why didn't they give their names and positions? I think it's illegal if it happened. But I'm like Trump and think the media just makes it up. If our "intelligence officials" know what North Korea is going now, why didn't they know what they were doing the past 10 years and tell US? The first we knew about ICBM capability that could strike the US was when we saw the damn thing flying over Japan.Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnDoe2
The US "intel" community is in a bucket of shit, aren't worth a damn, and has become totally corrupt. No wonder Pompeo wanted out of the CIA.
"NBC quoted a US official briefed on the latest intelligence as saying that uranium enrichment had been stepped up."
North Korea still secretly enriching uranium, say US officials
Report cites ‘unequivocal evidence they are trying to deceive the US’ in blow to Donald Trump
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...y-us-officials
Trump: 'possible' North Korea nuclear deal may not 'work out'
- President tells Fox he did not make concessions to Kim Jong-un
- Trump in fact agreed to end military exercises with South Korea
Tom McCarthy and Martin Pengelly
Sun 1 Jul 2018 11.38 EDT First published on Sun 1 Jul 2018 11.21 EDT
Donald Trump said on Sunday it was “possible” that a deal he claimed ended the nuclear threat posed by North Korea would not “work out”.
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/94e0a...sm=12&fit=max&
North Korea still secretly enriching uranium, say US officials
A day after it was reported that Pyongyang has increased its production of enriched uranium at secret sites, Fox Business broadcast an interview with the president.
Trump was pressed on whether he trusted Kim Jong-un, whom he met last month in Singapore and with whom he said he had “a great chemistry”, to make good on promises to destroy Pyongyang’s nuclear program.
“I made a deal with him, I shook hands with him, I really believe he means it,” said Trump. “Now, is it possible? Have I been in deals, have you been in things where, people didn’t work out? It’s possible.”
Trump’s words reversed his declaration upon his return from Singapore that North Korea had ended its nuclear ambitons.
“Just landed – a long trip, but everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office,” the president tweeted on 13 June. “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea. Meeting with Kim Jong Un was an interesting and very positive experience. North Korea has great potential for the future!”
Speaking to Fox, Trump also sought to shrink the perceived cost of the declared agreement falling through, seeking to frame his negotiations with North Korea as having been achieved without concessions.
“We gave nothing,” he said. “Think of this. What did I do, really, when you think of it? I went there. So the papers say, ‘He went’, oh, meaning I went to Singapore. So we had a meeting. We didn’t do anything.”
In fact, Trump agreed to end a range of joint military exercises with South Korea, meant to act as a deterrent against the North. In the interview with Fox, he said the exercises, “which I call war games”, were too expensive.
“They’re dropping bombs all over the place every six months,” he said, “it’s unbelievably expensive to do that. The planes fly in from Guam, these massive bombers. It’s crazy.”
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/c89f4...sm=12&fit=max&
Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, insisted that North Korea’s nuclear program could still be dismantled within a year.
NBC News and the Washington Post reported that North Korean attempts to conceal nuclear work. Earlier this week, the monitoring group 38 North reported that North Korea had made rapid improvements to a nuclear reactor.
Appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation, Bolton said he did not want to comment on the reports or on “anything related to intelligence” – NBC having quoted more than a dozen senior US intelligence officials and the Post four.
Bolton said Trump was not being played by Kim and was “very well aware of North Korea’s patterns of behaviour over decades of negotiating with the United States”.
He said: “We know exactly what the risks are of them using negotiations to drag out the length of time they have to continue their nuclear chemical biological weapons programs and ballistic missiles.”
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2254b...sm=12&fit=max&
North Korea making 'rapid' upgrades to nuclear reactor despite summit pledges
But, he added, Kim had been “very emphatic several times in Singapore he was different from prior regimes”.
“We have developed a program,” Bolton said, “…about really how to dismantle all of their WMD [weapons of mass destruction] and ballistic missile programmes in a year”.
“If they have the strategic decision already made to do that and they’re cooperative, we can move very quickly.
“And it’s to North Korea’s advantage to see these programs dismantled very quickly because then the elimination of sanctions aid by South Korea and Japan and others can all begin to flow.”
Secretary of state Mike Pompeo is due to meet Kim in early July. South Korean media reported on Sunday that Sung Kim, the US ambassador to the Philippines, held preparatory talks with North Korean officials in the village of Panmunjom, in the demilitarized zone.
A leading Senate foreign policy hawk, meanwhile, took a less diplomatic tone. Interviewed on NBC’s Meet the Press, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said North Korea would “regret it” if nuclear talks collapsed.
“I don’t want a war with North Korea,” Graham said. “The last best chance to avoid that war is a peaceful end to their nuclear program … if they don’t take it, and they play Trump like they’ve played everybody else, they’re going to regret it.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...y-not-work-out
Evidence suggests North Korea is plotting to keep its nuclear arsenal
Ellen Nakashima and Joby Warrick
The Washington Post
U.S. intelligence officials, citing newly obtained evidence, have concluded that North Korea does not intend to fully surrender its nuclear stockpile, and instead is considering ways to conceal the number of weapons it has and secret production facilities, according to U.S. officials.
The evidence, collected in the wake of the June 12 summit in Singapore, points to preparations to deceive the United States about the number of nuclear warheads in North Korea's arsenal as well as the existence of undisclosed facilities used to make fissile material for nuclear bombs, the officials said.
The findings support a new, previously undisclosed Defense Intelligence Agency estimate that North Korea is unlikely to denuclearize.
The assessment stands in stark contrast to President Donald Trump's exuberant comments following the summit, when he declared on Twitter that "there is no longer a nuclear threat" from North Korea. At a recent rally, he also said he had "great success'' with Pyongyang.
Intelligence officials and many North Korea experts have generally taken a more cautious view, noting that leader Kim Jong Un's vague commitment to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula is a near-echo of earlier pledges from North Korean leaders over the past two decades, even as they accelerated efforts to build nuclear weapons in secret.
The new intelligence, described by four officials who have seen it or received briefings, is based on material gathered in the weeks since the summit. The officials insisted on anonymity to discuss sensitive assessments about a country that has long been one of the most difficult targets for spy agencies to penetrate. Some aspects of the U.S. intelligence were reported Friday by NBC News.
http://www.trbimg.com/img-5b30d410/t...25/450/450x253
Specifically, the DIA has concluded that North Korean officials are exploring ways to deceive Washington about the number of nuclear warheads, and missiles and the types and numbers of facilities they have, believing that the United States is not aware of the full range of their activities.
U.S. intelligence agencies have for at least a year believed that the number of warheads is about 65, as reported last year by The Washington Post. But North Korean officials are suggesting that they declare far fewer.
The lone weapons facility that has been acknowledged by North Korea is in Yongbyon, 60 miles north of Pyongyang. That site is estimated to have produced fissile material for as many as a couple of dozen warheads.
Meanwhile, the North Koreans also have operated a secret underground uranium enrichment site known as Kangson, which was first reported in May by The Washington Post. That site is believed by most officials to have twice the enrichment capacity of Yongbyon. U.S. intelligence agencies became aware of the nuclear facility in 2010.
http://www.trbimg.com/img-5b2dacc3/t...22/450/450x253
In recent years, the United States, through imagery and computer hacking, has improved its intelligence collection in North Korea. Officials in Pyongyang are seeking to obfuscate the true number of their weapons facilities, and U.S. intelligence officials believe that more than just one hidden site exists. The Post is withholding details at the request of intelligence officials
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined requests for comment.
North Korea expert David Albright, a former United Nations weapons inspector and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, said the assessments come at a time when "there's a worry that the Trump administration may go soft, and accept a deal that focuses on Yongbyon and forgets about these other sites."
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has acknowledged that it could take years to implement any agreement on eliminating North Korea's nuclear stockpile, a hard-won asset that North Korean leaders regard as a guarantor of their survival. Asked by senators on Wednesday about the status of private talks with North Korean officials, he declined to offer specifics.
"I'm not prepared to talk about the details of the discussions that are taking place," he said in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. "I think it would be inappropriate and, frankly, counterproductive to achieving the end state that we're hoping to achieve."
Asked about Trump's claim that the North Korea threat had been eliminated, Pompeo said Trump had meant to say only that the threat had been reduced. "I don't think there's any doubt about that," he said.
While North Korea made a public show in June of demolishing the country's main nuclear weapons test site, there has been little public evidence of efforts to dismantle scores of other sites linked to production of nuclear and chemical weapons and delivery systems.
Even if North Korea's promises were sincere, it could take years of work, accompanied by an unprecedented agreement to grant access to outside inspectors, before U.S. officials could confidently say that the weapons threat has been neutralized.
As of now, there is little proof that North Korea intends to go down that road, longtime North Korea observers say.
"North Korea has made no new commitments to denuclearization, and in fact has backed away from its previous commitments," Abraham Denmark, Asia Program director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, told a House committee in late June.
"North Korea remains free to manufacture more nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles and other weapons of mass destruction - even though it has unilaterally frozen testing of its nuclear weapons and certain ballistic missiles," he said. "There is no deadline for them to eliminate their illegal capabilities, or even freeze their continued production."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/n...630-story.html
Yeah! sure have----my vote in the election Nov. 8, 2016Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnDoe2
Trump says North Korea will keep its promises, and the US will stop games
CNBC-Jun 12, 2018
Trump says North Korea will keep its promises, and the US will stop war ... remain in place until "the menace of nuclear weapons" is removed.
North Korean rockets flown over the Japanese archipelago
No. Date Model Area flown over Advance notice North Korean claim Satellite name 1 August 31, 1998 Taepodong-1 Akita No Satellite launch Kwangmyŏngsŏng-1 2 April 5, 2009 Unha-2 Akita, Iwate Yes Satellite launch Kwangmyŏngsŏng-2 3 December 12, 2012 Unha-3 Okinawa Yes Satellite launch Kwangmyŏngsŏng-3 4 February 7, 2016 Kwangmyŏngsŏng (Unha-3) Okinawa Yes Satellite launch Kwangmyŏngsŏng-4 5 August 29, 2017 Hwasong-12 Hokkaido No Missile launch N/A 6 September 15, 2017 Hwasong-12 Hokkaido No Missile launch N/A https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped..._Japan.svg.pnghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_N..._missile_tests
North Korean rockets flown over the Japanese archipelago