by Dr. Jack Wheeler
April 21, 2017

On Monday (4/17), Vice-President Mike Pence was here at the Panmunjom border between North and South Korea.  But this is a view the Silver Fox never saw.  For it is from the North Korean side.   I took this picture in 2010.

Many of you know I have been all over North Korea three times (twice more in 2012).  The article to read, for lots of photos and the real history as contrasted with the mythic of the most insane country on earth, is Pelosi in Pyongyang (September 2010, which I had to write under a pseudonym as I was under surveillance in Beijing).

There’s no more insane border on earth than what you’re looking at above.  The border runs through the middle of these three blue negotiation huts in the center of what’s known as the Joint Security Area.  You cannot believe how tense the atmosphere here is.

But let’s take a close look at something that’s hilarious.  We’re going to focus on those two Nork soldiers guarding the entrance to the main negotiation hut in the center – and on what’s next to them.

That’s right – a Samsung air conditioning unit, made by a South Korean company in South Korea.  The Norks can’t even make their own air conditioners, have to import them from their hated enemy.

And they’re supposed to be able to make sophisticated nuclear weapons and intercontinental delivery systems?  Right.

Last week (4/11) in Sean Spicer’s White House press briefing, there was this interchange:

“Q: And just to follow up on the North Korea question — Hallie read the President’s tweet — North Korea seemed to threaten the possibility of taking some type of nuclear action if the U.S. launches what they see as another provocation.  What is the specific reaction to that?  Is the President considering —

SPICER:  I don’t think — I think that there’s no evidence that North Korea has that capability at this time, so I don’t know that that could happen.

Q: What’s your reaction to them making that threat?

SPICER:  Well, I don’t think that threatening something that you don’t have the capability of — isn’t really a threat.”

Yet the Fake News Media ignored this admission – which should have made headline news – and instead ran clickbait fearmongering headlines as did the Washington Times yesterday (4/18): North Korea Has 30 warheads and Is Quickly Expanding Its Nuclear Arsenal.

Please note this story is based on pure speculation by some “expert” no one ever heard of who offers no solid evidence whatsoever for his claims. None, nada, zero, zippo.

For 13 years now, I have been informing you about how phony the Nork Nuke Threat is – starting in March 2004 with Is North Korea Faking It?

“Last January [2004], a team of US scientists, led by former Los Alamos lab director Sig Heckler, was allowed to visit the Yongbyon nuclear facility in North Korea.

The North Koreans produced a heavy glass jar containing a funnel-shaped piece of metal that was ‘blackish with a rough surface, according to Heckler. The jar was warm — plutonium generates heat — and seemed about right in terms of weight’ for Heckler. A Geiger counter registered radiation.

At a subsequent press conference in Beijing, the scientists announced North Korea has reprocessed enough plutonium for at least four bombs. A few days later, the North Korean government offered to freeze its nuclear weapons program in exchange for massive aid and the lifting of sanctions.

The question arises: is this all a con?

The stuff in the jar may well have been plutonium, but was it weapons-grade? That is, P-239.

If it was, then the North Koreans would have let the scientists take a q-tip swab of the stuff in the bottle, collecting a few micrograms for mass spectrometer analysis back in the US.

That would have confirmed it was the real deal. That they didn’t, and refused the scientists’ request to do so, shows that the stuff in the bottle is fake.

Here’s what most likely happened. The North Koreans don’t really know what they are doing, were pushed too hard to reprocess uranium fuel rods into plutonium, and left the rods in too long.

The longer you leave the rods in the reactor, the more uranium will be converted into plutonium — but the ratio of isotopes changes.

You need plutonium that is more than 90% of the 239 isotope (ideally 95%) to get the reaction to assemble fast enough for a nuclear explosion. 10% of the 240 or 242 isotopes and the reaction ‘fizzles.’

If, as seems likely, the stuff in the bottle was P-240/242 and not P-239, then the North Koreans are running an extortion racket. It’s a bluff.”

In February 2005, in response to blaring headlines around the world declaring North Korea Admits It Has Nukes!!, I demanded Riposte to Pyongyang:  Prove It.

“The CIA has reported that North Korea has reprocessed some 8,000 spent fuel rods at its Yongbyon nuclear plant into plutonium. The question is: is it the right kind?

Plutonium is a synthetic element made by exposing uranium-238 to neutrons. To get the isotope of plutonium that works in a fission bomb – +90% pure plutonium-239 – you can’t expose it too long, or extra neutrons will be added, making plutonium-240 or 242 instead.

You need about seven kilos of +90% P-239 formed into a hollow shell the size of an orange – called the ‘pit’ – surrounded by high explosive shaped charges set off in an extremely precise manner to implode the pit and set off the chain reaction. Too much P-240/242 and the reaction will disassemble or ‘fizzle.’

So will North Korea’s nukes fizzle or bang? There’s only one way to find out. You cannot be sure if you have nukes that work if you have not tested them.

Kim Jong-il’s extortion racket depends on the West believing he has them. How much more money would he be able to extort with a test proving he does? That he hasn’t is pretty strong evidence he’s bluffing.”

In October 2006, the Norks conducted their first nuke test. I quickly explained in North Korea’s Nuke Test Flop why a tiny yield of less than one kiloton meant that, sure enough, the Nork Nuke fizzled with over-cooked plutonium.

Since then, the Norks have conducted four more nuke tests.  May 2009: less than two kilotons (2kt);  February 2013: around 6kt; January 2016: a ludicrous claim of a “miniaturized hydrogen bomb” (a thermonuclear fusion bomb, not an atomic fission bomb) of which there is no real evidence it really took place;  September 2016: less than 10kt.

In the WaPo test timeline linked above, it’s claimed that 10kt is the size of Little Boy and Fat Man dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but that’s not true.  Little Boy was around 15kt while Fat Man was 20kt.

So while the first 4 tests (providing there was a 4th) were definitely fizzles, their best effort last September was only two-thirds of Hiroshima, meaning they still haven’t got it right.

What the Norks have got are clumsy hulking devices with an enormous amount of explosives packed around a pit of way less than 90% P-239.  And what they haven’t got is the ability to miniaturize it to fit into a missile warhead.

But have they got the missiles to put a nuke warhead in?  Google “North Korea fake missiles” and you’ll get 13,500,000 hits.

The Crazy Little Fat Kid – Kim Jong-un – who runs NorkLand held a massive parade in Pyongyang on Saturday (4/15) that showed off a “terrifying array” of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Few were fooled.  Around the world, headlines made fun of Kim’s Fake Missiles, A Big Hoax – Missiles That Can’t Fly, Kim’s Wobbly Painted Wooden Boxes.

The Bottom Line with a But.  The Norks are not a nuclear threat to the US.  So Hawaii can lay of the paranoia and San Francisco can laugh at the latest Nork stupid propaganda film.  They can relax.

The “But” is that South Korea can’t.  The threat to them is the 11 to 13,000 artillery tubes the Norks have aimed at downtown Seoul in the mountains just across the border.

There are 17 million people in greater Seoul.  A rain of tens of thousands of conventional artillery shells down upon them would cause the greatest single act of genocidal mass murder in human history.  That is the real ultimate nightmare threat of Communist North Korea.

It’s time to put an end to this.  Could it be done kinetically?  Perhaps.  There are any number of stories now on how Trump wiping out the ISIS command center in Afghanistan with a MOAB is a direct threat to the Norks.  And it is.  Carpet bombing the Nork artillery sites with MOABs would do it.

All those thousands of Nork soldiers dug in the tunnels manning the artillery tubes would be snuffed.  The MOAB system is designed to produce a fuel-rich fireball which leaves the tunnels filled with lethal carbon monoxide rather than just hot air.

There is a much better way, however. The real solution to North Korea is to get rid of it – as a country.  And the best way to do that is to get the Chicoms to do it for us.

So how about we get the smartest, savviest, most successful deal-maker you can think of to make the deal?

Does anyone come to mind?

That’s what all this war talk and positioning aircraft carrier strike groups and sending T Rex, then Pence, and now today Mad Dog to Seoul is all about.

Not to mention the incredibly smooth handling of President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago, topped off with the casual mention that Syria was being bombed during dessert.

The heart of the art of the deal is to persuade the folks on the other side of the table that it’s in their genuine interests to make it.

Note that they are already being persuaded – for with all Baby Kim’s loud-mouthing about the Big Nuke Test he was going to have last Saturday (4/15), he wimped out to Beijing with no test, and had his phony-missile parade instead – all show and no go.

So let’s see how Trump would negotiate a deal with Xi to get rid of the Kims, disarm the North Korean Army, and eliminate the existence of the DPRK – like East Germany into a unified Germany.  It would have these basic elements.

*The Chicoms supply most all of North Korea’s food, oil, electricity, money, banking, international communications, and just about everything else.  They steadily strangle the regime by withdrawing more and more of all of this.

*They arrange the termination of the Fat Kid’s presence on earth, engineering regime change with cooperative elements in Pyongyang who will be rewarded with life on easy street.

*The new government announces a peace treaty with Seoul that unifies both North and South into one country with an elected government on the model of South Korea.  The North Korean Army is disarmed, and its nuclear weapons program dismantled with international inspection.

*The Seoul government pays all costs of unification, disarmament, and provision of food and shelter for all North Koreans.  The Seoul government signs a formal treaty with Beijing guaranteeing that a Unified Korea will pursue a non-antagonistic foreign policy with China.  All US and any other foreign troops will be withdrawn from the Korean Peninsula.

*While pledging peace and friendship between China and Unified Korea, the deal does not require the latter to be pro-China nor anti-American – only that Seoul will never aggress against nor be a threat to China.  A Unified Korea remains sovereign and fully free to have solidly good relations with the US.

*A border adjustment will be made.

The provinces of Heilongjiang and Jilin in Northeast China or Manchuria are together the size of Texas (over 260,000 square miles) with a population of over 70 million – yet they are landlocked.

The last 11 miles of Korea’s side of the Tumen River – which forms its border with Russia and thus blocks Chinese Manchuria from sovereign access to the Pacific Ocean – will be ceded to China.

The Trump-Xi deal will be a lot more complicated than this, certainly – but those are the basic starting goals.

That it’s already begun to be in motion can be seen from Monday’s headline (4/17): North Korea Ignores Multiple Chinese Requests for Talks.  The Fat Kid sees it coming.  And he has a compulsion to make it worse.  Kim Jong-un is not long for this world.

Nor may North Korea.  Do not be shocked – but the day may not be far off when Donald Trump, jointly together with Xi Jinping, will receive the Nobel Peace Prize.  And in the starkest contrast to his predecessor, he will have earned it.

 

— Norks, Chicoms, and Trump originally appeared at To The Point News.