NUCLEAR SHOWDOWN WITH NORTH KOREA: How did we get to the point that Pyongyang may have 60 warheads? - Joel C. Rosenberg -
Disastrous deals cut by Presidents Clinton and Obama. Here are the facts.
While a preemptive North Korean nuclear attack on the U.S. and/or America's Pacific allies sounds like a plot ripped from my 2008 novel, Dead Heat, it may no longer be a fictional scenario.
U.S. intelligence agencies are now convinced that "North Korea has successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its missiles, crossing a key threshold on the path to becoming a full-fledged nuclear power," reports the Washington Post, based on a confidential analysis by the Defense Intelligence Agency.
"The United States calculated last month that up to 60 nuclear weapons are now controlled by North Korean leader Kim Jong In," notes the Post.
This week, Pyongyang threatened to attack the island of Guam with ballistic missiles that could be armed with nuclear weapons. With 160,000 residents and two U.S. military bases, the Pacific island territory now appears to be in Pyongyang's crosshairs.
President Trump immediately warned the leaders of North Korea not to dare even consider attacks against the American people or their allies, saying they would experience American "fire and fury like the world has never seen."
"Military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely," the President added. "Hopefully Kim Jong Un will find another path."
We need to pray for peace, and for our leaders to have wisdom to know how best to contain the North Korean threat and ratchet down tensions. We need to pray that countries like China will use their considerable leverage to persuade the North Koreans to back down. As a protective measure, the U.S. needs to be urgently bolstering its naval and air assets in the Pacific theater, as well as its missile defense assets, closely coordinating both defensive and offensive capabilities with allies like South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan, among others.
At the same time, we need to reexamine the disastrous nuclear deals both President Clinton and President Obama made with North Korea. Both men promised the American people that their diplomacy would make us all safer by persuading Pyongyang not to pursue nuclear weapons or the long-range ballistic missiles to deliver them. Both could not have been more wrong. Such serious misjudgments have helped get us to this exceedingly dangerous moment.
In October of 1994, President Bill Clinton cut a deal with North Korea in which Pyongyang agreed to "freeze and gradually dismantle its nuclear weapons development program," reported the New York Times.
"This agreement will help achieve a longstanding and vital American objective - an end to the threat of nuclear proliferation on the Korean Peninsula," Mr. Clinton told the American people.
"This agreement is good for the United States, good for our allies, and good for the safety of the entire world," Mr. Clinton added. "It's a crucial step toward drawing North Korea into the global community."
In return, the Clinton administration gave North Korea $4 billion in energy aid.
In addition, the Clinton deal gave North Korea two nuclear power plants, for which American taxpayers helped foot the bill.
"This is a good deal for the United States," Mr. Clinton said at the time. "North Korea will freeze and then dismantle its nuclear program. South Korea and our other allies will be better protected. The entire world will be safer as we slow the spread of nuclear weapons."
But Mr. Clinton and his senior advisors couldn't have been more wrong.
In February of 2012, President Obama was similarly duped.
Mr. Obama agreed to a deal in which Pyongyang promised (again) not to build nuclear weapons and stop testing long-range ballistic missiles.
In return, the Obama administration agreed to give North Korea 240,000 metric tons of food.
Experts warned the Obama team at the time that "it is naïve at best for the administration to herald a North Korean 'commitment to denuclearization' after the many years of North Korean actions definitively proving the contrary."
Less than a month later, Pyongyang tested another long-range rocket in clear violation of the agreement, and a humiliated Mr. Obama had to suspend the food aid program.
Clearly, the policy of "strategic patience" (read: "do nothing and hope for the best") run by Mr. Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been a colossal failure.
If all this weren't bad enough, it's made worse by the fact that the insane Obama nuclear deal with Iran was essentially patterned - and sold - after the Clinton deal with North Korea. As I warned in this Fox News interview and elsewhere (see here and here), the ayatollahs in Tehran are working closely with Pyongyang on nuclear and missile technology. They're also watching how the U.S. and the world powers handle a nation aspiring to become a nuclear armed power. So far, they're learning the West can be played for fools, and a small but aggressive nation can build a nuclear arsenal without much fear of being stopped.
North Korea: The Israeli Connection - By Ariel Nathan Pasko -
Why should Jews globally, and Israelis, care about what's going on, way over there on the Korean peninsula? Because as good world citizens we should? Because the second largest Jewish community, after Israel, is being threatened in America? Because the North Koreans are Weapons of Mass Destruction proliferators? Because of their aiding Iranian, Syrian, and possibly even Hamas and Hezbollah weapons development? Because we now have a chance to judge how the new American administration deals with a crisis, highly impacting on close allies? Because the latest North Korean ICBM test proves North Korea can hit Israel? If you answered, all of the above, you win the grand prize, an escape card from Nuclear Incineration Island...
By the way, North Korea has never recognized the State of Israel. Even after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the opening up of China, North Korea has continued its Cold War rhetoric, calling Israel an "imperialist satellite''.
North Korea has continuously supported the Palestinian cause. Relations with the PLO began in 1966. Kim Il-Sung - the current North Korean leader's grandfather - and Yasser Arafat, had a very close relationship. North Korea provided arms and aid to the PLO, PFLP, and DFLP throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s. Since Yasser Arafat's declaration of independence in 1988, North Korea has recognized the "State of Palestine''.
There's never been a military conflict between Israel and North Korea...
Guess again, during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, North Korea sent 20 pilots and 19 non-combat military advisors to Egypt. They deployed a MiG-21 Squadron to Bir Arida to protect Egypt's south, the first aerial engagement on the Egyptian front, took place on October 6th, when Israeli F-4s engaged North Korean-piloted MiG-21s. On October 19th, the NYT reported that the Soviet news agency TASS disclosed that Premier Kim Il-Sung had met with Egyptian and Syrian ambassadors in Pyongyang, promising "to give material assistance, including military aid" to them.
Over the years, North Korea has supplied various weapons, missile technologies, and NBC -Mass-Destruction - technologies, to several of Israel's enemies, including Iran, Syria, Libya, Egypt, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Hezbollah and Hamas. For example, Libya had the same designs as North Korea for a 500-kilogram nuclear warhead missile, before Gaddafi shut down the program.
Because of the Syrian Civil War, the Assad regime has lost a lot of equipment. The North Koreans have replenished them with T-55 tanks (North Korean variants), trucks, RPGs and shoulder-fired missiles. According to North Korean expert, Bruce Bechtol, "if you look at the Syrian army, it is much like the North Korean one, based on legacy Soviet systems from the 1950s and 1960s."
Syrian-North Korean nuclear cooperation can be clearly seen. On September 6, 2007, when the IAF attacked a target in the Deir ez-Zor region of Syria, it was reported that at least 10 North Koreans, who "had been helping with the construction of a nuclear reactor'' were killed during the airstrike. The Syrian nuclear facility was nearly identical to that of North Korea's Yongbyon installation. According to reports, the facility was built by North Koreans and financed by Iran.
North Korea has forged a relationship with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) since 1983. North Korea sends weapons to Hezbollah via the IRGC trafficking network or transfers them through Syria, or they are shipped directly from North Korea to Hezbollah in Lebanon, paid for by Iran.
Since 2003, North Korean engineers have built underground facilities for Hezbollah, directly into rock, some of which the IDF struggled to target, in the Second Lebanon War in 2006. Hezbollah has an entire underground "city" of command and control bunkers and tunnels in southern Lebanon, all built with the aid of the Iranians, who paid the Korean Mining Development Company to do it. North Korean technicians moved into Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, pretending to be Chinese domestic workers.
After the 2006 war, 100 Hezbollah fighters traveled to North Korea for a year of training in guerrilla warfare tactics, under a body known at the time as the Reconnaissance Bureau. North Korean advisers have also trained Hezbollah fighters in Iran.
North Korea has thousands of 107mm and 122mm rockets sitting around in warehouses, plus rocket-propelled grenades and SKS semiautomatic rifles. Looking for cash, the North Korean regime has sold many of these arms to Hezbollah.
Hamas, like Hezbollah, has close links with North Korea, which is happy to support groups that are opposed to Western interests in the Middle East. The relationship between Hamas and North Korea first became public in 2009 when 35 tons of arms, including surface-to-surface rockets and rocket-propelled grenades, were seized after a cargo plane carrying the equipment was forced to make an emergency landing at Bangkok airport. Investigators later confirmed that the arms had been destined for Iran, who planned to transfer them to Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in Gaza. In 2014, North Korea and Hamas struck a deal for the sale of 102mm and 107mm multiple rocket launchers. Hamas installed some of these systems on pickup trucks.
North Korea regularly condemns Israeli defensive actions against Hamas, such as during the 2008-2009 and 2014 Israel-Gaza conflicts, and the 2010 Gaza flotilla raid as "crimes against humanity,'' as well as a threat to the Middle East Peace Process.
The North Koreans have one of the world's most sophisticated network of tunnels running beneath the demilitarized zone with South Korea. The IDF believes Hamas has used this expertise to improve their own tunnel network in Gaza. For example, the type of cement reinforcement, enabling Hamas fighters to move weapons without detection by Israeli drones, is similar to North Korean tunnels.
And now for Iran; during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, North Korea began selling them Scud B missiles. They also sold Iran artillery, tanks, and trucks, Soviet-made equipment from the1950s and 1960s.
Since then, North Korea has sold Iran Scud B, C, D, extended-range scuds, and played a central role in Iran's domestic missile development program. They've helped Iran build the Safir two-stage missile and the Sejil solid fuel missile. Iran's Imad and Shihab-3 ballistic missile programs are based on North Korea's Nodong missile prototype, with an extended range.
North Korea has sent at least two long-range missile parts shipments to Iran in the past two years. Iranian technicians also traveled to North Korea for help in developing an 80-ton rocket booster.
Since the mid-2000s, Iran came up with an ingenious way to avoid US missile nonproliferation enforcement. It built Shihab-3 "factories," which were actually North Korean-supervised assembly stations, allowing North Korea to smuggle the missiles in pieces. The components are assembled under the supervision of North Korean advisers. The same thing happens with the Scud D missiles in Syria, and with chemical weapons in Syria according to Bechtol.
Iran is still relying on parts coming over from North Korea. The North Koreans split them up into components - they are harder to detect that way. Without North Korea, Iran's entire liquid fuel ballistic missile industry would grind to a halt, he said. The Assad regime, too, would lose its Scud missile program.
Bechtol claims the North Koreans helped Iran develop a nuclear warhead for the Nodong missile, and assisted with the Iranian plutonium reactor at Arak. "We know that the head of Iran's highly enriched uranium program was in North Korea in 2013, likely to observe a uranium nuclear test," he said.
About the latest crisis between America and North Korea, watch closely. America fought a serious war on the Korean Peninsula in the early 1950's with North Korea and has been South Korea's ally and protector since. They also have had a strategic partnership with Japan, since the 1950's. As the saying goes, "countries don't have friends, just interests." There are close parallels between the US, South Korea, and Japan, vis-a-vis North Korea, and the US and Israel, vis-a-vis Iran. So Jews and Israel should be watching closely how the Trump administration "protects" its allies. One can get a picture of just how well America would cover Israel under its "security umbrella," when pushing Israel to take a "chance for peace" as has been suggested, in any future Middle East peace deal, by watching the Korean crisis unfold. And, it will give a clue as to how much Israel can count on the US in dealing with Iran's nuclear program.
Guess what, if you thought the latest ballistic missile tests of North Korea proved they can finally hit Israel, you're wrong. They've been able to hit Israel theoretically, since their 2012 test of the Taepodong-2, or in 2013 with their UnHa-3, which successfully launched a satellite and could have carried a 500-kilogram nuclear warhead. See, satellite launching ability and ICBM nuclear warhead delivery are closely related.
Don't worry, Israel has its own Jericho-3 ICBM that could hit North Korea, not to mention Iran. Israel's Jericho-3, is a missile with a multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) warhead, allowing for more flexibility in targeting and better anti-ballistic missile (ABM) survivability. In fact with Israel's submarines and aircraft loaded with nuclear tipped cruise missiles, Israel has a nuclear triad, of land, sea, and air delivered weapons, guaranteeing a credible second-strike capability.
And if that's not enough deterrence, don't forget Israel's homegrown multi-tiered missile defense system, including Iron Dome, David's Sling, Arrow-2 and 3, and the Barak-8. The Arrow-3 is not only an anti-ICBM missile but can be used as an anti-satellite weapon as well. Iron Beam and Drone Dome are laser-interception systems.
Lt. Gen. Patrick J. O'Reilly, Director of the Missile Defense Agency in the American Dept. of Defense, said in 2009: The design of Arrow-3 promises to be an extremely capable system, more advanced than what we have ever attempted in the US with our programs...This has to do with the seekers that have greater flexibility and other aspects, such as propulsion systems - it will be an extremely capable system. Maybe America can get some Israeli Arrow-3 batteries, to protect themselves against incoming North Korean ICBMs.
The Arrow-3 system was just declared fully operational in January of 2017, but believe it or not, Israel is already developing a concept for a sort of Arrow-4 system, to keep one step ahead of its enemies. Israel's MAFAT Defense Research and Development Authority of the Ministry of Defense, along with state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries and other defense firms, are working to evaluate technologies needed to improve the ability to track, target and ultimately destroy future threats, such as massive salvo strikes, submunition warheads and multiple reentry vehicles, or MRVs.
About the vulnerable Jews in America, who have used the excuse for years, that "it's too dangerous to live in Israel;" well, it's about time for Aliya - to come home to Israel - before it's too late, no more excuses!
Do you have your Escape Card yet?
US Military Exercise Near North Korean Border on Day of Eclipse Sparks Fears of Nuclear War - By Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz - https://www.breakingisraelnews.com
"And the sun stood still And the moon halted, While a nation wreaked judgment on its foes -as is written in the Book of Jashar. Thus the sun halted in midheaven, and did not press on to set, for a whole day." Joshua 10:13 (The Israel Bible�)
On Monday, tens of thousands of US soldiers will simulate battles just south of the volatile border that separates North and South Korea, causing several world governments to worry that this huge multinational military exercise could inadvertently spark World War III. In a strange coincidence, the military maneuvers commence while a rare solar eclipse, prophesied as a bad omen for "kings of the east", passes over America.
On Monday, the US will begin a large-scale ten-day multinational military exercise in South Korea named Ulchi-Freedom Guardian (UFG). Approximately 25,000 American service members will participate in the exercise, with about 2,500 coming in from off-peninsula. Forces from South Korea (ROK) will participate, as well as militaries from nine other countries: Australia, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, France, Italy, Philippines, United Kingdom and New Zealand.
The US holds two major exercises annually in Korea focused on defending South Korea from the north: Foal Eagle and Key Resolve in March or April, and the UFG in August. These joint exercises have been held since the Korean War ended in a ceasefire in 1953 and have always been a point of contention, but this year, as tensions rise between the US and North Korea, the exercise has become a major source of concern.
Every year, the exercises trigger threats from North Korea, which sees them as acts of aggression, but the threats coming out of North Korea recently took on a decidedly bellicose tone. The state-run Korean Central News Agency published a report Monday quoting their supreme leader:
"[Kim Jong Un] said that if the planned fire of power demonstration is carried out as the US is going more reckless, it will be the most delightful historic moment when the Hwasong artillerymen will wring the windpipes of the Yankees and point daggers at their necks, underlining the need to be always ready for launching into action anytime our Party decides."
The threat of escalation due to the military exercise is so serious that other nations have stepped in to encourage the US to cancel the exercise. Sergei Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, said in a statement to the media last Friday that Moscow was deeply worried and considered the risk of military conflict between the US and North Korea "very high". He suggested a plan under which North Korea would halt missile tests if the US and South Korea would cancel the military exercises.
The Russian suggestion has an unfortunate precedent. In 1992, Washington and South Korea suspended an annual exercise called Team Spirit as part of diplomatic efforts to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear program. North Korea later reneged on its agreements and the US resumed military exercises.
Objections to the exercises have also come out from China. "The drill will definitely provoke Pyongyang more, and Pyongyang is expected to make a more radical response. If South Korea really wants no war on the Korean Peninsula, it should try to stop this military exercise," read an editorial in China's Global Times.
The already-tense international situation began to heat up in the beginning of August when the US and the United Nations enacted harsh economic sanctions against North Korea in response to illegal nuclear tests and test flights of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
North Korea responded by running more tests, leading to a US warning in the form of two US B-1 bombers overflying the Korean Peninsula two weeks ago. North Korea responded by threatening Guam, where the US bombers were stationed, with nuclear retaliation.
Undaunted, President Donald Trump threatened North Korea with "fire and fury like the world has never seen". He doubled down on Friday by saying that the US was "locked and loaded" to take on North Korea and that the rogue nation's supreme leader, Kim Jong Un, would "regret it fast" if he attacked the US territory of Guam. Though the North Korean leader retracted his threat, spy satellite photos released four days ago revealed North Korean mobile missile launcher movement.
The fears that the upcoming military exercises may set off a real-world conflict are well-grounded. In March, in reaction to the Foal Eagle exercises, North Korea test-fired four ballistic missiles. This led to a Pentagon announcement that it was deploying a missile defense system known as Terminal High Altitude Area Defense on the Korean Peninsula with the approval of the government in Seoul.
The commencement of the military exercise coincides with a rare solar eclipse that will traverse the entire United States. An esoteric Jewish book written in Safed (Tsfat) over a century ago warned that a solar eclipse on the eve of the Hebrew month of Elul, beginning Monday night, signals that the "kings of the east will suffer great destruction". Rabbi Yosef Berger, rabbi of King David's Tomb on Mount Zion, told Breaking Israel News that in light of current rising political and military tensions, he interprets this to mean Kim Jong Un is clearly the eastern leader referred to in this prophecy.
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