North Korean military blows up ships and planes. North Korea threatens to eliminate South with secret weapon. Obama’s message for North Korea in visiting Burma: Let’s make up. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un applauds during a military parade.
(Ed Jones / AFP/Getty Images) On Monday, President Obama visited a medium-sized Asian country known for its international isolation, brutal military dictatorship and flirtations with nuclear weapons. If that sounds familiar, you are not alone in seeing some parallels between the reforming autocracy of Burma (also known as Myanmar; more on that distinction here), which Obama became the first-ever sitting U.S. president to visit, and North Korea. Before the trip, I wrote that Obama's bracingly fast-paced detente with Burma sends the message to other rogue states that the Obama administration is willing to let bygones be bygones, to work with ruling regimes instead of pushing its leaders into international criminal courts, and to even reward regimes that take positive steps. I assumed such a message would be implicit, but it turns out to have been quite explicit.
Not certain North Korea prepping launch. Update (12/1): North Korea has announced it is indeed intending to launch a test rocket within days By Barbara Starr The Pentagon and the intelligence community are scouring classified and commercial imagery for any evidence of a North Korean missile launch, but they have not firmly concluded that one will occur, according to a senior U.S. military official.
While not discounting the possibility of a launch, the U.S. military is leaving open the chance there could be other motives with new activity observed around a North Korean launch pad. "They could be moving things around just to make a point," the official said. "But on the other hand it's the North Koreans, so who knows. " The official said a key question in military and intelligence circles is whether the North Koreans would have been able to solve the engineering problems they experienced with the failed launch of a similar missile in April. North Korea tests nuclear weapon 'as powerful as Hiroshima bomb' North Korea today risked further international isolation after it claimed to have successfully tested a nuclear weapon as powerful as the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
The test comes less than two months after the North enraged the US and its allies by test firing a long-range ballistic missile. The KNCA news agency, the regime's official mouthpiece, said: "We have successfully conducted another nuclear test on 25 May as part of the republic's measures to strengthen its nuclear deterrent. " Officials in South Korea said they had detected a tremor consistent with those caused by an underground nuclear explosion. The country's Yonhap news agency reported that the North had test-fired three short-range missiles from a base on the east coast immediately after the nuclear test. The underground atomic explosion, at 9.54am local time (0154 BST), created an earthquake measuring magnitude 4.5 in Kilju county in the country's north-east, reports said. While Preparing for Rocket Launch, North Korea May Be Wrestling with Dissent - Korea Real Time. Crisis Guide: The Korean Peninsula.