Posted on Dec. 29th (Reuters) – North Korea likely is closer to mounting nuclear warheads on its ballistic missiles than generally reported, possibly only one or two years away, the U.S. Congress’s former top expert on the issue has concluded. Larry Niksch, who tracked North Korea for the nonpartisan U.S. Congressional Research Service for 43 [...]

Posted on Dec 29th The shadow of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s death hangs over Northeast Asia as leaders work to reassure each other of cooperation to ensure stability in the uncertain transition ahead. South Korean President Lee Myung-bak spoke by telephone with Japan’s Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko, whom just a day or two earlier [...]

Posted on Dec 21st SEOUL, South Korea – North Korea test-fired a short-range missile off its east coast on Dec. 19, the same day it announced the death of leader Kim Jong-Il, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said. The agency quoted an unnamed government official as saying the missile launch was unrelated to the announcement [...]

Posted on Dec 21st The death of North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il over the weekend, and the uncertainty surrounding the transition of power to his youngest son, Kim Jong-Un, has raised new questions about a project to pipe natural gas from Russia across the secretive state to its southern neighbor. Since the Monday announcement of Kim’s [...]

Posted on Dec 21st TOKYO, Dec 20 (Reuters) – Japan picked Lockheed Martin’s F-35 jet as its next mainstay fighter on Tuesday, choosing the aircraft over combat-proven but less stealthy rivals, as concern simmers over North Korea and as China introduces its own stealth fighters. The decision came as Japan and the United States stressed that their [...]

Posted on Dec 21st WASHINGTON (Kyodo) — Japanese Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton agreed Monday to keep in close contact with each other as well as with South Korea on how to deal with North Korea following the death of its leader Kim Jong Il over the weekend. Stressing [...]

Posted on Dec.21st SEOUL — In the wake of leader Kim Jong Il’s death, North Korea is likely to shift for the first time to a collective leadership model, with a small circle of older caretakers advising — and sharing power with — untested heir apparent Kim Jong Eun, Seoul’s intelligence agency said this week. The [...]

Posted on Dec 8th It’s no secret that North Korea has been providing missile technology to Syria, to Iran and to other countries, typically in the form of local assembly, although several of Pyongyang’s former missile customers have stopped their business. The issue of nuclear co-operation is quite a bit less clear. With regard to [...]

Posted on Nov 30th North Korea said yesterday that uranium enrichment and construction of a nuclear power-plant was “progressing apace”, increasing concerns that the country is working to build an atomic weapon. A foreign ministry statement added that North Korea had a sovereign right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy and that “neither concession nor compromise [...]

Posted on Nov 28th North Korea has supplied Syria and Iran with a special kind of steel used to upgrading missiles and building centrifuges for Uranium enrichment, the German newspaper Die Welt reported over the weekend. The material, called maraging steel, appears on the monitoring list of the Nuclear Suppliers Group and the Missile Technology [...]