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Bahng Tae-seop and his colleagues at SERI have released the 2013 first quarter report on the Korean peninsula security outlook. It may come as no surprise that the experts surveyed forecast heavy weather. The index of current conditions fell for the fourth consecutive quarter to 42, approaching the all-time minimum of 41 at the time [...]
In connection to the economic sanctions mandated under UNSC 1718, in previous posts we have examined the exports of luxury goods to North Korea by China and the EU. Unlike China, Russia actually did submit a list of banned exports to the UN sanctions committee, though in comparison to others, the Russian list is relatively [...]
We offer the following from the 11 October 2012 (we won’t bother to translate into juche-time) Minju Joson, a North Korean government newspaper, without editorial comment: The United States Raised the Curtain on a Cyber Armament Race “The United States is going into full swing on cyber armament development lately. According to news reports, the US [...]
The US is not the only country in the midst of a presidential election. In an earlier post, I reprinted some snippets of Ahn Cheol-soo’s musings on North Korea taken from his book. Opposition rival Moon Jae-in has made a major policy speech on North Korea; Karin Lee at the National Committee on North Korea [...]
Even when we disagree, Andrei Lankov is one of our favorite observers of North Korea. His rightly-cynical writings and voluminous columns are infused with his late-Soviet experience and deep reading in the Russian archives. For those with an historical interest in North Korea, his two books on the early postwar period are must-reads: From Stalin [...]
No sooner had we posted on North Korea’s debt to the South than our friends at Nautilus published a short piece by long-time North Korea watcher Georgy Toloraya on the resolution of the DPRK’s Russian debt. North Korea suspended payments on Soviet debt in 1990. The ruble-denominated debt supposedly financed industrial projects and military hardware, [...]
One of the more disturbing developments of the spring has been North Korean jamming of GPS navigation of airliners flying in and out of Incheon airport as well as ships traveling near the disputed Northern Limit Line. The North Koreans eventually stood down, but also earned a rebuke from the International Telecommunications Union, which requested [...]
North Korea got mention in the G8 declaration that came out of meetings at Camp David this week. But we were pleasantly surprised that the statement went beyond the nuclear and missile issues and renewed commitment to the sanctions regime. It also included specific mention not only of abductions—in line with Japanese interests—but political prisoners [...]
We provided our take on the freeze, including a cautiously bullish interview with my colleague Marc Noland. We also noted that the reaction of the blogosphere was less positive. The 4th International has been worrying that North Korea might go the way of Burma. On a more serious note, we thought we should check the [...]
Adam Cathcart recently pulled together a thorough dossier on early Chinese reactions to the death of Kim Jong Il (our highlights here). He and colleague Charles Kraus have now produced a second dossier based on a small cache of four newly-declassified CIA documents and a memorandum of a conversation between Kim Il Sung and Eric [...]
