Two ground-to-ship weapons were fired from an east coast launch site between 5:20 p.m. and 6 p.m., with a third missile taking off from that coast about two hours later, Reuters reported. That was followed by a fourth launch (Kim/Kim, Reuters, July 2).
A South Korean military source told the Yonhap News Agency that all four weapons were KN-O1 missiles, which can fly up to 100 miles. Each went about 60 miles before dropping into the East Sea (Jae-Soon Chang, Associated Press/Washington Post, July 2).
The launches all originated from a base near the city of Wonsan and were completed by 9:20 p.m., Agence France-Presse reported.
They might be followed by additional missile tests in coming days.
Among the weapons that are set for launch are the Scud-B, which can fly more than 200 miles, and the Rodong missile, which has a range of more than 800 miles but might be restricted to roughly 250 miles in this instance, according to the South Korean JoongAng Ilbo newspaper.
Tensions with Pyongyang have been high since the regime in April launched what it said was a satellite-topped rocket. International condemnation of the event — seen in many sectors as a test of long-range missile technology — led the North to pull out of denuclearization talks and threaten to resume operations at its plutonium-producing Yongbyon nuclear complex. The state on May 25 then tested another nuclear device and fired several short-range missiles, prompting the U.N. Security Council to issue another sanctions resolution.
Today’s launches came as U.S. officials were in China in hopes of persuading leaders in Beijing to aggressively enact the latest penalties against North Korea. China, meanwhile, hopes to persuade its neighbor to return to the nuclear negotiations.
The recent actions could be North Korean leader Kim Jong Il’s attempt to display authority as he prepares to hand power over to his youngest son, observers say.
“We have repeatedly warned that such a provocative act is not beneficial for North Korea’s national interest,” said Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso (Agence France-Presse/Spacewar.com, July 2).
“We had expected that they will fire short-range missiles at any time,” South Korean Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan told AP. “It’s not a good sign because they are demonstrating their military power.”
There is no indication that North Korea is preparing to soon carry out its reported plan to launch an ICBM that could hit U.S. territory, according to the South Korean television network YTN (Chang, Associated Press).
Two U.S. scientists said that North Korea could hit much of the United States with a modified version of the rocket launched in April.
“North Korea has conducted two nuclear tests, but it isn’t thought to have designed a nuclear warhead that could be delivered by a missile. Such a first-generation plutonium warhead could have a mass of 1,000 kilograms or more,” according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Theodore Postol and physicist David Wright of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“If the Unha-2 was designed to launch a relatively lightweight satellite, its structure may not allow it to carry a 1,000-kilogram warhead. If it could, we estimate that it could have a range of 10,000-10,500 kilometers, allowing it to reach Alaska, Hawaii, and roughly half of the lower 48 states. If a 1,000-kilogram payload were instead launched by the first two stages of this missile, it would have a range of 7,000-7,500 kilometers. This would allow it to reach Alaska and parts of Hawaii, but not the lower 48 states,” they stated in a recent Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article (Postol/Wright, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June 29).
The head of U.S. Northern Command this week asserted the ability of the nation’s missile defenses to bring down a long-range North Korean missile.
“The nation has a very, very credible ballistic-missile defense capability. Our ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California, I’m very comfortable, give me a capability that if we really are threatened by a long-range ICBM that I’ve got high confidence that I could interdict that flight before it caused huge damage to any U.S. territory,” Air Force Gen. Victor Renuart told the Washington Times. (Bill Gertz, Washington Times, July 2).
Day: July 2, 2009
2.July DKBA news by KNL Japan
ေလးစားရပါေသာ ကရင္အမ်ိဳးသားမ်ားသို ့
က်ေနာ္ ကိုယ္က်ေနာ္မိတ္ဆက္ပါရေစ၊ က်ေနာ္ ဟာ ဒီေကဘီေအ မွာ ထိပ္ပိုငး္တာဝန္ယူရတဲ့ သူတစ္ဦးျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ က်ေနာ္အခု တင္ျပ ေျပာျပခ်င္တဲ့ အခ်က္ကေတာ့ က်ေနာ္လံုးဝမခံစားနိုငေ္တာ့လို ့ ရင္ဖြင့္ရျခငး္ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ continue
The tripartite Core Group is urging donors to contribute US$ 157 million for rebuilding schools in cyclone-hit Irrawaddy delta of Burma.
TCG urges donors to shore up support for cyclone survivors
by Solomon
Thursday, 02 July 2009 19:04
New Delhi (Mizzima) – The tripartite Core Group is urging donors to contribute US$ 157 million for rebuilding schools in cyclone-hit Irrawaddy delta of Burma.
The TCG, formed with the United Nations, the Burmese regime and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), formed in the wake of the deadly Cyclone Nargis, to oversee humanitarian assistance in the devastated areas, on Tuesday said, thousands of children in the delta are being forced to resume their education in temporary shelters and without proper supply of educational kits.
Bishow Parajuli, the UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Burma, in a press statement on Tuesday urged the international community to increase support for children as a huge number of school-going children lack a proper place of learning.
“The international community should increase its support, to complement national efforts to rebuild all the destroyed schools with permanent structures to reduce the risk from possible future disasters,” Parajuli said.
“Also, we need to do even more to support teachers to deal with children under complex and challenging circumstances, and help them recover from the psychological impact of the cyclone,” he added.
Cyclone Nargis, which left more than 140,000 dead or missing and devastated the lives of at least 2.4 million people, also destroyed 56.6 per cent of the total number of schools, accounting for 4,106, in the delta. Continue reading “The tripartite Core Group is urging donors to contribute US$ 157 million for rebuilding schools in cyclone-hit Irrawaddy delta of Burma.”
U.S. Blacklists Companies Suspected of Aiding North Korean Nuclear, Missile Projects
U.S. Blacklists Companies Suspected of Aiding North Korean Nuclear, Missile Projects
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
The United States announced yesterday it had blacklisted two firms suspected of assisting North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs as part of a redoubled effort to derail the reclusive nation’s nuclear-weapon operations (see GSN, June 30).
The announcement came amid reports that a North Korean freighter being tracked by the U.S. Navy on suspicion of carrying contraband weapons had changed course and might be headed home.
The U.S. Treasury said it has frozen all the U.S.-held assets of North Korea’s Namchongang Trading Corp. and the Iran-based Hong Kong Electronics, Reuters reported. The value of the U.S. assets held by the two firms, or whether they have any, is not known. The Treasury has also forbidden U.S. companies from dealing with the targeted companies.
Namchongang Trading Corp. is suspected of buying aluminum tubes and other uranium-enrichment paraphernalia for the North for about a decade. Pyongyang recently confirmed suspicions that it has been pursuing uranium-enrichment technology. U.S. officials worry that Pyongyang might use a difficult-to-monitor enrichment program to produce nuclear-weapon material. The regime possesses a known plutonium-based program (Reuters, June 30).
Namchongang is also thought to have been instrumental in providing material used in construction of a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor that was destroyed in a 2007 Israeli airstrike (see GSN, June 18).
The Treasury Department said that Hong Kong Electronics “has transferred millions of dollars of proliferation-related funds” to North Korean entities that have already been targeted by U.S. and U.N. penalties. The Iranian firm “has also facilitated the movement of money from Iran to North Korea” for suspected ballistic missile equipment dealer called Korea Mining Development Trading Corp., the U.S. agency said (Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, July 1).
“North Korea uses companies like Hong Kong Electronics and a range of other deceptive practices to obscure the true nature of its financial dealings, making it impossible for responsible banks and governments to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate North Korean transactions,” said Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Levey in a statement.
Washington hopes the move both will weaken the companies by cutting them off from the U.S. economy and prompt banks and companies in other nations, fearful of the consequences of breaking U.S. laws, to cut off contact with the sanctioned firms.
Philip Goldberg, the lead U.S. official on coordinating sanctions against North Korea, was scheduled to visit China this week to press officials there on carrying out the penalties (Reuters, June 30).
Meanwhile, a North Korean cargo ship that has been monitored closely since it left Pyongyang about two weeks ago appears now to be returning to its home port, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, June 23).
The ship Kang Nam 1 was thought to be carrying weapons — possibly small arms — to Myanmar in defiance of a June 12 U.N. resolution banning the North from exporting and importing munitions. The U.N. Security Council passed the embargo in response to North Korea’s underground nuclear test in late May.
The Kang Nam 1 is the first ship to be monitored in accordance with the embargo. North Korea had warned any undue interdiction of its trade vessels would amount to a declaration of war.
“Touching our ships constitutes a grave military provocation against our country,” Pyongyang reiterated today through the state-run newspaper Rodong Sinmun. “These acts will be followed immediately by self-defensive military countermeasures.”
Observers had said that Washington’s ability to inspect the ship’s cargo before it reached its destination — without provoking military escalation from the North — would serve as a litmus test for the efficacy of the U.N. sanctions, which several analysts and U.S. lawmakers have called into question.
Instead the ship, which had been heading south along the Chinese coast, on Sunday wheeled around several hundred miles south of Hong Kong and is now headed north. Its final destination remains unknown (Kwang-Tae Kim, Associated Press/Yahoo! News, July 1).
Some high-level U.S.officials speculated that the freighter’s much-scrutinized trip was North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il’s way of testing U.S. President Barack Obama, the New York Times reported.
“The whole thing just doesn’t add up,” said a senior White House official before the Kang Nam 1 made its about-face. “My worry is that we make a big demand about seeing the cargo, and then there’s a terse standoff, and when it’s all over we discover that old man Kim set us up to look like George Bush searching for nonexistent WMD” (David Sanger, New York Times, July 1).
South Korea said yesterday it is formulating its own protocols for interdicting ships it believes are carrying WMD materials, the Korea Times reported.
Seoul’s Defense Ministry told a National Assembly panel that it is working out plans to enforce the U.N. sanctions against North Korea and fulfill its interdiction responsibilities under the Proliferation Security Initiative, an international effort aimed toward blocking the worldwide WMD trade.
The South signed on to the initiative following North Korea’s May 25 nuclear test (see GSN, May 26; Jung Sung-ki, Korea Times, June 30).
A trading company affiliated with North Korea, whose president was arrested Monday on suspicion of attempting to illegally export to Myanmar a device required for long-range ballistic missile systems, may have illegally exported dual-use devices on several previous occasions, police said.
Firm tied to past Myanmar exports / N. Korea-affiliated Toko Boeki may have illegally shipped missile devices
The Yomiuri Shimbun
YOKOHAMA–A trading company affiliated with North Korea, whose president was arrested Monday on suspicion of attempting to illegally export to Myanmar a device required for long-range ballistic missile systems, may have illegally exported dual-use devices on several previous occasions, police said.
The Kanagawa prefectural police have arrested Lee Kyoung Ho, president of Tokyo-based Toko Boeki, and two others on suspicion of attempting to illegally export a magnetic measuring device to Myanmar on instructions from North Korea, an act that violates the Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Law.
In addition to the magnetic device, the prefectural police plan to prosecute Lee, 41, on suspicion of illegally exporting other devices from Japan to Myanmar.
The prefectural police believe North Korea’s attempt to transfer missile technology to Myanmar has had some success.
According to the police, Toko Boeki began exporting to Myanmar about a year before the country resumed diplomatic ties with North Korea in April 2007.
After studying customs declaration documents submitted by Toko Boeki, the prefectural police confirmed that Japanese devices including external cylindrical grinders and LCR meters had been exported to Myanmar.
According to sources, an external cylindrical grinder is essential for producing a gyroscope, a device integral for controlling the trajectory of missiles. LCR meters, meanwhile, are used to measure radio waves and electricity. Both devices are included on the so-called Catch-all Control restricted list prohibiting exports of products that could be used for weapons of mass destruction.
The prefectural police believe Toko Boeki may have exported the devices to Myanmar without obtaining Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry approval.
The prefectural police have analyzed material seized during a search of Toko Boeki in February and discovered that the company was instructed by the Beijing office of New East International Trading Ltd., a company under the umbrella of the Workers’ Party of Korea, to send the devices to Myanmar.
The economy ministry has put New East International’s Pyongyang office on the list of companies that might use exported items and technologies in developing weapons of mass destruction, as it is concerned the office is involved in developing such weapons. The company’s head office is located in Hong Kong.
Lee is a member of the Korean Youth Commerce Community, under the umbrella of the pro-Pyongyang General Association of Korean Residents in Japan. After graduating from university, he worked at a trading company before establishing Toko Boeki in 1998.
According to a private credit research company, Toko Boeki recorded sales of 150 million yen in the year ending in January 2008.
The company was said to be trading mainly food products to North Korea, South Korea and China.
The company was located at a multitenant building in Shinjuku Ward, but the office closed on June 25 and its signs were removed.
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20090702TDY02308.htm
Gun Running Gets Smart
strategypage
July 2, 2009: Over the last decade, North Korea has exported about $800 million worth of weapons, (mainly to Iran, Syria and Myanmar). That’s puny by international standards, where total arms in the last decade were over $500 billion. But for North Korea, with a population of 22 million, and a GDP of about $26 billion, $80 million of arms sales a year is a big deal (as in over three percent of GDP, and a major source of hard currency for buying imports.)
But with a growing number of international sanctions on North Korea (for breaking agreements, and developing ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons), it’s getting increasingly difficult to deliver these weapons. In response, North Korea has adopted many tricks to hide the movement of these weapons. The easiest one is to move the weapons by rail, through China or Russia, to a port in those countries. From there, a Chinese or Russian cargo ship (or one from another country) can deliver the goods. The ships are chartered by an off shore company that has no publically known connection to North Korea. False papers can be obtained for the cargo, and so on. Continue reading “Gun Running Gets Smart”
Press Release: Aung San Suu Kyi to Face the Hotel Indonesia Roundabout (02/07/2009)
The British Embassy will be projecting a giant image of imprisoned Burmese democracy leader and Nobel Prize Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi from sunset on Thursday 2 July until sunset on Saturday 4 July. The image will be projected onto a banner located at the perimeter of the Hotel Indonesia roundabout. The initiative is intended to mark two important events.
Firstly, on Friday 3 July Aung San Suu Kyi’s trial will resume in Burma. The UK Government, along with many other voices in the international community, calls for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and of all other political prisoners in Burma.
Secondly, the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, will visit Burma on 3 July. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has warmly welcomed the Secretary-General’s decision to travel to Burma at this important juncture. The UK Government believes it is essential that progress is made during the Secretary-General’s visit in laying the groundwork for free and fair elections in Burma in 2010. The visit will offer an opportunity for the Burmese regime to respond to the many calls for the release of all political prisoners, including Aung San Suu Kyi; and to allow the start of a genuinely inclusive political dialogue involving the opposition and minority groups.
British Foreign Office Minister Ivan Lewis has said “This is a key moment for Burma and its people and I wish the Secretary-General every success.”
British Chargé d’Affaires Matthew Rous said “Burma’s neighbours have a duty to call loudly for the release of Aung Sang Suu Kyi. I am greatly encouraged by the fact that Indonesia’s voice is being heard so loudly and clearly. I hope the British Embassy’s initiative will help us all to keep Aung Sang Suu Kyi’s image in front of our eyes during this hugely important visit.”
Notes for Editors
1. Aung San Suu Kyi is the leading pro-democracy figure inBurma and has received the Nobel Peace prize. She has been detained forover 13 years by the Burmese regime for campaigning for human rightsand democracy.
2. British Chargé d’Affaires Matthew Rous will begiving statements to the media on Thursday, 2 July at 1530hrs at theBritish Embassy premises. Media should pre-register attendance throughGrace Hutasoit at 0811 100 5358.
3. For more information on the British government policy on Burma please visit our website: http://www.ukinindonesia.fco.gov.uk
http://ukinindonesia.fco.gov.uk/en/newsroom/?view=News&id=20488645
UK embassy in Jakarta to display giant Suu Kyi image
UK embassy to display giant Suu Kyi image
Ary Hermawan , The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Thu, 07/02/2009 3:20 PM | National
The British embassy in Jakarta will display a giant image of jailed Myanmar democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi to call for her release and that of other political prisoners in the military-ruled country.
The image will be projected onto a banner installed at the perimeter of Bundaran HI traffic circle in Central Jakarta from Thursday until Saturday, the embassy said in a statement released Thursday.
The projection will start at sunset.
The initiative is being launched as Suu Kyi’s trial resumes in Myanmar on Friday; United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is scheduled to visit the country also on Friday.
“The UK Government believes it is essential that progress is made during the Secretary-General’s visit in laying the groundwork for free and fair elections in Burma in 2010,” the statement said.
“The visit will offer an opportunity for the Burmese regime to respond to the many calls for the release of all political prisoners, including Aung San Suu Kyi; and to allow the start of a genuinely inclusive political dialogue involving the opposition and minority groups.”
British chargé d’Affaires in Jakarta Matthew Rous said Myanmar’s neighbors had a duty to call loudly for Suu Kyi’s release.
“I am greatly encouraged by the fact that Indonesia’s voice is being heard so loudly and clearly. I hope the British Embassy’s initiative will help us all to keep Aung Sang Suu Kyi’s image in front of our eyes during this hugely important visit,” he said.
Jakarta post
democracy for burma 
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