North Korea Says It Is Making Nuclear Bombs

Can anyone point out one Bush administration foreign policy that has made the world safer? Anyone? Granted, this was a colossal cock-up of the first order, but I cannot think of any foreign policy triumphs of this administration to offset this. Europe is telling us "You broke Iraq, you fix it back up". Russia isn't helping, even as it slides back into a quasi-authoritarian maybe-democracy(no free media). Every country in the Middle East is watching us warily.

I've got a new book to read, Crisis on the Korean Penninsula, by Michael O'Hanlon and Mike Mochizuki. I'll tell you all about it when I'm done.

Yahoo! News - N. Korea Says It Is Making Nuclear Bombs

SEOUL, South Korea - North Korea said Thursday it is using plutonium extracted from 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods to make atomic weapons, a move that could dramatically escalate tensions on the Korean peninsula and strengthen its hand in negotiations with the United States.

The claim came as some U.S. intelligence analysts are becoming increasingly concerned that North Korea might have three, four or even six nuclear weapons instead of the one or two the CIA now estimates.

"The (North) successfully finished the reprocessing of some 8,000 spent fuel rods," a spokesman from Pyongyang's Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the North's official news agency KCNA. The spokesman was not named.

Accusing the United States of taking a "hostile policy" toward the North, the statement said North Korea "made a switchover in the use of plutonium churned out by reprocessing spent fuel rods in the direction (of) increasing its nuclear deterrent force."

(snip)

The nuclear dispute flared last October when U.S. officials said North Korea admitted running a secret nuclear weapons program in violation of international agreements.

The United States and its allies suspended oil shipments to the North. North Korea in turn expelled U.N. nuclear inspectors, withdrew from the global nuclear arms-control treaty and said it was reactivating its main nuclear complex, frozen since 1994.

The United States, the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia met in Beijing in August to try to defuse the crisis. The meeting ended without agreement on when to hold the next round, as Washington and Pyongyang differed widely over how to resolve the dispute.

North Korea has since said it was no longer interested in further talks.