Tag Archives: Kim Jong-un

North Korean elite turning against leader Kim: defector

North Korea leader Kim Jong Un

By James Pearson

SEOUL (Reuters) – The North Korean elite are outwardly expressing their discontent towards young leader Kim Jong Un and his government as more outside information trickles into the isolated country, North Korea’s former deputy ambassador to London said on Wednesday.

Thae Yong Ho defected to South Korea in August last year and since December 2016 has been speaking to media and appearing on variety television shows to discuss his defection to Seoul and his life as a North Korean envoy.

“When Kim Jong Un first came to power, I was hopeful that he would make reasonable and rational decisions to save North Korea from poverty, but I soon fell into despair watching him purging officials for no proper reasons,” Thae said during his first news conference with foreign media on Wednesday.

“Low-level dissent or criticism of the regime, until recently unthinkable, is becoming more frequent,” said Thae, who spoke in fluent, British-accented English.

“We have to spray gasoline on North Korea, and let the North Korean people set fire to it.”

Thae, 54, has said publicly that dissatisfaction with Kim Jong Un prompted him to flee his post. Two university-age sons living with him and his wife in London also defected with him.

North and South Korea are technically still at war because their 1950-53 conflict ended in a truce, not a peace treaty. The North, which is subject to U.N. sanctions over its nuclear and missile programs, regularly threatens to destroy the South and its main ally, the United States.

Thae is the most senior official to have fled North Korea and entered public life in the South since the 1997 defection of Hwang Jang Yop, the brains behind the North’s governing ideology, “Juche”, which combines Marxism and extreme nationalism.

Today’s North Korean system had “nothing to do with true communism”, Thae said, adding that the elite, like himself, had watched with unease as countries like Cambodia, Vietnam and the former Soviet Union embraced economic and social reforms.

Thae has said that more North Korean diplomats are waiting in Europe to defect to South Korea.

North Korea still outwardly professes to maintain a Soviet-style command economy, but for years a thriving network of informal markets and person-to-person trading has become the main source of food and money for ordinary people.

Fully embracing these reforms would end Kim Jong Un’s rule, Thae said. Asked if Kim Jong Un’s brother, Kim Jong Chol, could run the country instead, Thae remained skeptical.

“Kim Jong Chol has no interest in politics. He is only interested in music,” Thae said.

“He’s only interested in Eric Clapton. If he was a normal man, I’m sure he’d be a very good professional guitarist”.

(Reporting by James Pearson; Editing by Nick Macfie)

U.S. deploys high-tech radar amid heightened North Korea rhetoric: official

radar to spy on North Korea

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A high-tech sea-based U.S. military radar has left Hawaii to monitor for potential North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile test launches, a U.S. defense official said on Wednesday.

Earlier this month, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said that the isolated, nuclear-capable country was close to test-launching an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the radar, known as the Sea-based X-band radar (SBX), left on Monday and would reach its destination, about 2,000 miles (3,218 km) northwest of Hawaii, towards the end of January.

The radar is able to track ICBMs and differentiate between hostile missiles and those that are not a threat.

On Tuesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said the U.S. military might monitor a North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile test and gather intelligence rather than destroy it, as long as the launch did not pose a threat.

“If the missile is threatening, it will be intercepted. If it’s not threatening, we won’t necessarily do so,” Carter said,

“Because it may be more to our advantage to, first of all, save our interceptor inventory, and, second, to gather intelligence from the flight, rather than do that (intercept the ICBM) when it’s not threatening.”

Carter’s remarks came just over a week after U.S. President-elect Donald Trump vowed that North Korea would never fulfill its threat to test an ICBM. Trump said in a Jan. 2 tweet: “It won’t happen!”

“The SBX’s current deployment is not based on any credible threat; however, we cannot discuss specifics for this particular mission while it is underway,” Commander Gary Ross, a Pentagon spokesman, said.

(Reporting by Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart; Editing by James Dalgleish)

North Korea says can test-launch ICBM at any time: official news agency

File photo of ballistic missile

SEOUL (Reuters) – North Korea declared on Sunday it could test-launch an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) at any time from any location set by leader Kim Jong Un, saying a hostile U.S. policy was to blame for its arms development.

Kim said on Jan. 1 that his nuclear-capable country was close to test-launching an ICBM.

“The ICBM will be launched anytime and anywhere determined by the supreme headquarters of the DPRK,” an unnamed Foreign Ministry spokesman was quoted as saying by the official KCNA news agency, using the acronym for the country’s name.

The North is formally known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

U.S. Defence Secretary Ash Carter said on Sunday that North Korea’s nuclear weapons capabilities and ballistic missile defence programs constituted a “serious threat” to the United States and that it was prepared to shoot down a North Korean missile launch or test.

“We only would shoot them down … if it was threatening, that is if it were coming toward our territory or the territory of our friends and allies,” Carter said during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program.

The United States said on Jan. 5 that North Korea had demonstrated a “qualitative” improvement in its nuclear and missile capabilities after an unprecedented level of tests last year.

North Korea has been testing rocket engines and heat-shields for an ICBM while developing the technology to guide a missile after re-entry into the atmosphere following a liftoff, experts have said.

While Pyongyang is close to a test, it is likely to take some years to perfect the weapon, according to the experts.

Once fully developed, a North Korean ICBM could threaten the continental United States, which is around 9,000 km (5,500 miles) from the North. ICBMs have a minimum range of about 5,500 km (3,400 miles), but some are designed to travel 10,000 km (6,200 miles) or farther.

On Monday, South Korean defence ministry spokesman Moon Sang-gyun called North Korea’s statement a “provocative announcement” and told a regular news briefing that Pyongyang would face stronger sanctions if it were to launch an ICBM. Unification Ministry spokesman Jeong Joon-hee said there were no signs of any launch preparations.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump responded to Kim’s comments on an ICBM test by declaring in a tweet last week: “It won’t happen!”

Asked for comment on Sunday, the White House referred to Jan. 3 comments by White House press secretary Josh Earnest in which he said the U.S. military believed it could protect against the threat emanating from North Korea.

In that briefing, Earnest also touted the defensive measures the United States had taken to guard against the threat, such as anti-ballistic missile facilities that had been installed around the Pacific region and diplomatic pressure to discourage North Korea from pursuing its nuclear program.

A U.S. State Department spokesman said last week that the United States did not believe that North Korea was capable of mounting a nuclear warhead on a ballistic missile.

North Korea has been under U.N. sanctions since 2006 over its nuclear and ballistic missile tests. The sanctions were tightened last month after Pyongyang conducted its fifth and largest nuclear test on Sept. 9.

“The U.S. is wholly to blame for pushing the DPRK to have developed ICBM as it has desperately resorted to anachronistic policy hostile toward the DPRK for decades to encroach upon its sovereignty and vital rights,” KCNA quoted the spokesman as saying.

“Anyone who wants to deal with the DPRK would be well advised to secure a new way of thinking after having clear understanding of it,” the spokesman said, according to KCNA.

Here is an interactive guide to North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes produced by the Reuters graphics team.(http://tmsnrt.rs/2inl1WO)

(Reporting by Jack Kim and Ju-min Park; Additional reporting by Julia Harte in Washington; Editing by Angus MacSwan and Peter Cooney)

North Korea’s Kim guides special operations drill targeting South

Combat Drills in North Korea

SEOUL (Reuters) – North Korean leader Kim Jong Un guided a special operations drill targeting the South, the North’s media reported on Sunday, as rival South Korea remained on alert for any attempt by the North to take advantage of political turmoil in the South.

The North’s KCNA state news agency report did not say when North Korean forces conducted the combat exercise, nor did it mention the South Korean parliament’s vote on Friday to impeach its president, Park Geun-hye.

Pictures in a Sunday report on the exercise in the North’s Rodong Sinmun newspaper showed what appeared to be a mockup of South Korea’s presidential Blue House as a target.

Park will remain in the Blue House, though her powers have been suspended and assumed by the South’s prime minister while the Constitutional Court weighs parliament’s impeachment vote.

South Korean Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn has urged a high state of military alert in case of any provocation by North Korea, including possible cyber attacks.

“We are ready to retaliate if North Korea makes any provocations and we condemn its malicious threat,” a South Korean military official told Reuters.

Tension on the divided Korean peninsula has been high this year after two North Korean nuclear tests and an unprecedented flurry of ballistic missile tests.

The North’s tests have brought tighter U.N. Security Council sanctions but no indication North Korea and its young leader Kim are willing to compromise on its nuclear and missile programmes.

The Rodong Sinmun pictures included one of Kim observing the exercise through binoculars.

“Watching the brave service personnel independently and pro-actively perform their combat duty destroying specified targets of the enemy, he said with a broad smile on his face: ‘Well done, the enemy troops will have no space to hide themselves, far from taking any counteraction’,” KCNA cited Kim saying.

(Reporting by Ju-min Park and Yun Hwan Chae; Writing by Tony Munroe; Editing by Robert Birsel)

Squeezing North Korea: old friends take steps to isolate regime

Friendship bridge between China and North Korea

By Ju-min Park and Tony Munroe

SEOUL (Reuters) – From kicking out North Korean workers and ending visa-free travel for its citizens, to stripping flags of convenience from its ships, Cold War-era allies from Poland to Mongolia are taking measures to squeeze the isolated country.

More such moves, with prodding from South Korea and the United States, are expected after North Korea recently defied U.N. resolutions to conduct its fifth nuclear test.

North Korea’s limited global links leave most countries with few targets for penalizing the regime on their own.

Mounting sanctions over the years have made Pyongyang more adept at evasion and finding alternative sources for procurement, a recent paper by experts at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found.

Nonetheless, South Korea has been especially active in pushing the North’s allies for unilateral action in hopes of reining in Pyongyang’s arms program.

“If long-standing friends of North Korea continue to publicly curb their ties with the country, Pyongyang will have fewer places overseas where its illicit networks can operate unhindered or with political cover from the host capital,” said Andrea Berger, deputy director of the proliferation and nuclear policy program at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).

South Korean officials have declined to say whether they have made inducements to countries to punish North Korea.

“Presumably in the course of that diplomatic interaction it is also being made clear to Pyongyang’s partners that deeper trade ties with economies like South Korea will not be fully realizable” without taking steps against North Korea, Berger said.

Angola, for one, has suspended all commercial trade with Pyongyang, banning North Korean companies from operating there since the U.N. toughened sanctions in March, a South Korean foreign ministry official told Reuters recently.

Angola was suspected of buying military equipment in 2011 from North Korea’s Green Pine Associated Corp, which is under U.N. sanction, according to a 2016 U.N. report. North Korea had also cooperated with Angola in health care, IT and construction, South Korea’s embassy there said in December.

Angolan officials did not respond to requests for comment, but the country told the U.N. in July it had not imported any light weapons from North Korea in recent years.

North Korea’s export of cheap labor has also been targeted.

Earlier this year, Washington urged countries to curb the use of North Korean workers, who number roughly 50,000 and generate between $1.2 billion and $2.3 billion annually for Pyongyang, according to a 2015 U.N. report.

Poland, which hosted as many as 800 North Korean workers, according to some estimates, this year stopped renewing visas, as did Malta.

Travel restrictions have also increased, with Ukraine recently revoking a Soviet-era deal that allowed visa-free visits for North Koreans.

Singapore, which has been a hub for North Korea-linked trade, will require visitors from the country to apply for visas starting next month, its immigration authority said in July.

DE-FLAGGED

The vast majority of North Korea’s trade is with China, and experts warn sanctions will have limited impact without Beijing’s backing. China condemns Pyongyang’s nuclear program but is also its chief ally and is unwilling to pressure leader Kim Jong Un’s regime too far, fearing a collapse that would destabilize the entire region. That means agreeing significantly tightened U.N. sanctions could be difficult.

Some of the most tangible results of recent efforts to isolate North Korea have seen countries ban its ships from their registries. North Korean-owned vessels are suspected of using other flags to camouflage the movement of illicit cargo.

Landlocked Mongolia, which is among Pyongyang’s steadiest allies but also has close ties with Seoul, canceled the registrations of all 14 North Korean vessels flying its flag, according to a report it submitted to the U.N. in July, even though sanctions compelled it to act on just one of them.

Cambodia, once the most popular flag of convenience for North Korea, ended its registry scheme for all foreign ships in August, although it did not single out North Korea.

The flags of 69 North Korean ships, none of them on a U.N. blacklist, have been de-registered since the U.N. tightened sanctions in March, South Korea’s foreign minister said last month. The North’s merchant fleet is estimated by the U.N. at roughly 240 vessels.

Still, one-off measures by various countries mean Pyongyang can simply shift its business elsewhere – a shortcoming of unilateral actions in general.

China and Russia employ the bulk of North Korean workers and have publicly shown no inclination to halt the practice.

Last week, North Korean state media announced the Sept 19 “inauguration” of its embassy in the Belarusian capital Minsk. However, on Monday, the Belarus foreign ministry said there was no North Korean embassy there, although it did not immediately give further information.

Pyongyang has been known to use diplomatic personnel, several whom have been caught with large amounts of gold or cash, to procure banned equipment or fund illegal activities.

China, experts say, remains the key.

“Rather than being efficient, unilateral actions put psychological pressure on the North,” said Chang Yong-seok, a senior researcher at the Institute for Peace and Unification Studies at Seoul National University. “But like criminal gangs, North Korea won’t cringe much under psychological pressure.”

(Additional reporting by Andrei Makhovsky in Minsk, Herculano Coroado in Luanda and Prak Chan Thul in Phnom Penh; Editing by Lincoln Feast)

North Korea ramps up uranium enrichment, enough for six nuclear bombs a year: experts

Kim Jong Un of North Korea

By Jack Kim and James Pearson

SEOUL (Reuters) – North Korea will have enough material for about 20 nuclear bombs by the end of this year, with ramped-up uranium enrichment facilities and an existing stockpile of plutonium, according to new assessments by weapons experts.

The North has evaded a decade of U.N. sanctions to develop the uranium enrichment process, enabling it to run an effectively self-sufficient nuclear program that is capable of producing around six nuclear bombs a year, they said.

The true nuclear capability of the isolated and secretive state is impossible to verify. But after Pyongyang conducted its fifth and most powerful nuclear test last week and, according to South Korea, was preparing for another, it appears to have no shortage of material to test with.

North Korea has an abundance of uranium reserves and has been working covertly for well over a decade on a project to enrich the material to weapons-grade level, the experts say.

That project, believed to have been expanded significantly, is likely the source of up to 150 kilograms (330 pounds) of highly enriched uranium a year, said Siegfried Hecker, a leading expert on the North’s nuclear program.

That quantity is enough for roughly six nuclear bombs, Hecker, who toured the North’s main Yongbyon nuclear facility in 2010, wrote in a report on the 38 North website of Johns Hopkins University in Washington published on Monday.

Added to an estimated 32- to 54 kilogram plutonium stockpile, the North will have sufficient fissile material for about 20 bombs by the end of 2016, Hecker said.

North Korea said its latest test proved it was capable of mounting a nuclear warhead on a medium-range ballistic missile, but its claims to be able to miniaturize a nuclear device have never been independently verified. [nL3N1BL1ND]

Assessments of the North’s plutonium stockpile are generally consistent and believed to be accurate because experts and governments can estimate plutonium production levels from telltale signs of reactor operation in satellite imagery.

South Korean Defence Minister Han Min-koo this year estimated the North’s plutonium stockpile at about 40 kilograms.

But Hecker, a former director of the U.S. Los Alamos National Laboratory, where nuclear weapons have been designed, has called North Korea’s uranium enrichment program “their new nuclear wildcard,” because Western experts do not know how advanced it is.

PAKISTAN CONNECTION

Jeffrey Lewis of the California-based Middlebury Institute of International Studies said North Korea had an unconstrained source of fissile material, both plutonium from the Yongbyon reactor and highly-enriched uranium from at least one and probably two sites.

“The primary constraint on its program is gone,” Lewis said. Weapons-grade plutonium has to be extracted from spent fuel taken out of reactors and then reprocessed, and therefore would be limited in quantity. A uranium enrichment program greatly boosts production of material for weapons.

The known history of the uranium enrichment project dates to 2003, when the North was confronted by the United States with evidence of a clandestine program to build a facility to enrich uranium with the help of Pakistan.

Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said in his memoirs that A.Q. Khan, the father of that country’s nuclear program, transferred two dozen centrifuges to the North and some technical expertise around 1999.

“It was also clear that the suspected Pakistani connection had taken place, as the centrifuge design resembled Pakistan’s P-2 centrifuge,” Hecker said in a report in May.

Hecker reported being shown around a two-story building in the Yongbyon complex in November 2010 that a North Korean engineer said contained 2,000 centrifuges and a control room Hecker called “astonishingly modern.”

By 2009, the North had likely acquired the technology to be able to expand the uranium project indigenously, Joshua Pollack, editor of the U.S.-based Nonproliferation Review, has said.

North Korea has not explicitly admitted to operating the centrifuges to produce weapons-enriched uranium, instead claiming they were intended to generate fuel for a light water reactor it was going to build.

Despite sanctions, by now North Korea is probably largely self-sufficient in operating its nuclear program, although it may still struggle to produce some material and items, Lewis said.

“While we saw this work in Iran, over time countries can adjust to sanctions,” he said.

(Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)

North Korea publicly executes two officials for disobeying Kim Jong Un

File photo of North Korean flag flying on a mast at the Permanent Mission of North Korea in Geneva

SEOUL (Reuters) – North Korea publicly executed two officials in early August for disobeying leader Kim Jong Un, a South Korean newspaper reported on Tuesday, in what would be the latest in a series of high-level purges under the young leader’s rule, if confirmed.

Kim took power in 2011 after the death of his father, Kim Jong Il, and his consolidation of power has included purges and executions of top officials, South Korean officials have said.

Citing an unidentified source familiar with the North, the JoongAng Ilbo daily said former agriculture minister Hwang Min and Ri Yong Jin, a senior official at the education ministry, had been executed.

The report could not be independently verified, and South Korea’s Unification Ministry, which handles North Korea-related matters, did not have immediate comment.

Some previous media reports of executions and purges in the reclusive state later proved inaccurate.

The report of the executions comes soon after the South said North Korea’s deputy ambassador in London had defected and arrived in the South with his family, dealing an embarrassing blow to Kim’s regime.

North Korea rarely announces purges or executions, although state media confirmed execution of Kim’s uncle and the man widely considered the second most powerful man in the country, Jang Song Thaek, in 2012 for factionalism and crimes damaging to the economy.

A former defense minister, Hyun Yong Chol, is also believed to have been executed last year for treason, according to the South’s spy agency.

The JoongAng Ilbo said the two men were executed by anti-aircraft gun at a military academy in Pyongyang.

North Korean state media described Hwang, one of the officials named, as agriculture minister in 2012, and referred to him as a vice minister of agriculture in 2014.

Hwang was killed because his policy proposals were seen as a challenge to Kim Jong Un, JoongAng Ilbo said. Ri was caught nodding off during a meeting with Kim and later investigated for corruption and showing disrespect to the leader, it added.

(Reporting by Ju-min Park; Additional reporting by James Pearson; Editing by Tony Munroe and Clarence Fernandez)

North Korea says missile test simulated attack on South’s airfields

Kim Jong Un watching missile test

By Jack Kim

SEOUL (Reuters) – North Korea said on Wednesday it had conducted a ballistic missile test that simulated preemptive strikes against South Korean ports and airfields used by the U.S. military, a likely reference to the launches of three missiles on Tuesday.

The North’s leader, Kim Jong Un, supervised the exercise that successfully tested the simulated detonation of nuclear warheads mounted on missiles, its official KCNA news agency reported.

It did not give the date of the exercise, as it customarily reports activities of its leader without dates or locations. Rodong Sinmun, the ruling Workers’ Party’s official newspaper, carried photographs of Kim with military aides, apparently observing a ballistic missile exercise.

North Korea fired three ballistic missiles that flew between 500 km and 600 km (300-360 miles) into the sea off its east coast, South Korea’s military said, in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions and the latest in a series of provocative moves by the isolated country after a series of nuclear weapons tests.

“The drill was conducted by limiting the firing range under the simulated conditions of making preemptive strikes at ports and airfields in the operational theater in South Korea where the U.S. imperialists’ nuclear war hardware is to be hurled,” KCNA said.

“And it once again examined the operational features of the detonating devices of nuclear warheads mounted on the ballistic rockets at the designated altitude over the target area.”

Yang Uk, a senior researcher at the Korea Defence and Security Forum and a policy adviser to the South Korean navy, said there was little firm evidence to suggest the North had succeeded in developing a nuclear warhead for missiles.

“But it’s a reminder that they are continuing to pursue nuclear warhead development, and that itself is an escalation of risks for us,” he added.

Tuesday’s missile launches were seen as a show of force a week after South Korea and the United States chose a site in the South to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) anti-missile system to counter threats from the North.

North Korea had threatened a “physical response” to the move.

“The idea seems to be to signal that (U.S.) war plans cannot succeed because if we activated them, the North Koreans would strike as we made the attempt,” said Joshua Pollack, editor of the U.S.-based Nonproliferation Review.

Late on Tuesday, North Korean state media called U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Mark Lippert a “mentally deranged hooligan” and “a heinous war maniac” for flying in a U.S. fighter jet earlier this month.

Reclusive North Korea occasionally publishes insults of U.S. and South Korean officials.

The North and the rich, democratic South are technically still at war because their 1950-53 conflict ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty. The North regularly threatens to destroy Japan, South Korea and the South’s main ally, the United States.

The U.S. air force said Lippert flew in a familiarization flight in an F-16 on July 12 to gain better understanding of the U.S. and South Korea’s joint defense against North Korea.

(Additional reporting by James Pearson; Editing by Nick Macfie)

U.S. sanctions North Korean leader for first time over human rights

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un posing with school children

By David Brunnstrom and James Pearson

WASHINGTON/SEOUL (Reuters) – The United States on Wednesday sanctioned North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for the first time, citing “notorious abuses of human rights,” in a move diplomats say will infuriate the nuclear-armed country.

The sanctions, the first to target any North Koreans for rights abuses, affect property and other assets within the U.S. jurisdiction. They include 10 other individuals besides Kim and five government ministries and departments, the U.S. Treasury Department said in a statement.

“Under Kim Jong Un, North Korea continues to inflict intolerable cruelty and hardship on millions of its own people, including extrajudicial killings, forced labor, and torture,” Acting Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Adam J. Szubin said in the statement.

But inside North Korea, adulation for Kim, 32, is mandatory and he is considered infallible. A 2014 report by the United Nations, which referred to Kim by name in connection to human rights, triggered a strong reaction from Pyongyang, including a string of military provocations.

Earlier this year, Congress passed a new law requiring U.S. President Barack Obama to deliver a report within 120 days to Congress on human rights in North Korea. It had designate for sanctions anyone found responsible for human rights violations. Kim Jong Un, the third generation of his family to rule the Stalinist state, topped the list.

The U.S. Treasury Department identified Kim’s date of birth as Jan. 8, 1984, a rare official confirmation of the young leader’s birthday.

Many of the abuses are in North Korea’s prison camps, which hold between 80,000 and 120,000 people including children, the report said.

The five agencies designated were two ministries that run North Korea’s secret police and their correctional services, which operate the prison camps. Also named were the ruling Workers’ Party’s Organization and Guidance Department (OGD), a key bureau used by Kim to wield control of the party and the government.

The sanctions also named lower-level officials, such as Minister of People’s Security Choe Pu Il, as directly responsible for abuses.

FORCED LABOR

Senior U.S administration officials said the new sanctions showed the administration’s greater focus on human rights in North Korea, an area long secondary to Washington’s efforts to halt Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs.

The report was “the most comprehensive” to date on individual North Korean officials’ roles in forced labor and repression.

They said the sanctions would be partly “symbolic” but hoped that naming mid-level officials may make functionaries “think twice” before engaging in abuses. “It lifts the anonymity,” a senior administration official told reporters.

The North Korea mission to the United Nations did not respond to a request for comment.

South Korea, which cut off all political and commercial ties with its own sanctions against the North in February, welcomed the move, saying it will encourage greater international pressure on the North to improve its human rights record.

China’s foreign ministry, asked about the new sanctions, reiterated its policy of opposing unilateral sanctions.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, visiting Beijing on Thursday, said he is very concerned about rising tension on the Korean peninsula and called on North Korea to refrain from making any provocations.

MORE SANCTIONS TO COME

Using sanctions against a head of state is not unprecedented. In 2011, the United States sanctioned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and six other senior Syrian officials for their role in Syria’s violence. Former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was also sanctioned.

Policymakers often worry that targeting a country’s leader will destroy any lingering chance of rapprochement, former diplomats say.

It is a sign “there probably isn’t much of a hope for a diplomatic resolution,” said Zachary Goldman, a former policy adviser in the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.

The new sanctions follow a long list of measures that have had little effect in pressuring North Korean leaders to change, experts who study the North’s political system said.

“The sanctions from today will do nothing whatsoever to alter North Korea’s strategic calculus and only underscore their thinking that the U.S. has a ‘hostile policy’ against their country,” said Michael Madden an expert on the North Korean leadership.

“Considering the sanctions name Kim Jong Un, the reaction from Pyongyang will be epic,” he said. “There will be numerous official and state media denunciations, which will target the U.S. and Seoul, and the wording will be vituperative and blistering.”

Peter Harrell, a former State Department sanctions official, said the measures would signal to companies in China, as well as others doing business with North Korea, the U.S. would continue escalating sanctions.

Harrell added it was unlikely any assets would be blocked, however “given the realities of where Kim Jong Un and his cronies likely hide their assets.”

In March, the U.N. Security Council imposed harsh new sanctions on the country in response to its nuclear and missile tests.

That same month, Obama imposed new sanctions on North Korea after it conducted its fourth nuclear test and a rocket launch that Washington and its allies said employed banned ballistic missile technology.

Those steps froze any property of the North Korean government in the U.S. and essentially prohibited exports of goods from the U.S. to North Korea.

“The United States has maintained sanctions and pressure against the North for 65 years since the Korean War, but there’s not been a single case where the intended result was accomplished,” said Yang Moo-jin of the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul.

“How much time is left in the Obama administration? There may be the wish to prove the policy of ‘strategic patience’ against the North has not failed, but when it comes to practical results, there won’t be much to show,” Yang said.

(Additional reporting by Patricia Zengerle, Yeganeh Torbati and Joel Schectman in Washington, Michelle Nichols at the United Nations and Ben Blanchard in Beijing; Editing by Yara Bayoumy and Bill Tarrant)

North Korea leader says missile launch shows ability to attack U.S. in Pacific

Kim Jon Un at a test launch

By Jack Kim

SEOUL (Reuters) – North Korea leader Kim Jong Un said after supervising the test launch of an intermediate-range missile that the country now has the capability to attack U.S. interests in the Pacific, official media reported on Thursday.

South Korean and U.S. military officials have said the North launched what appeared to be two intermediate-range missiles dubbed Musudan on Wednesday. The first of the two was considered a failure.

The second reached a high altitude in the direction of Japan before plunging into the sea about 400 km (250 miles) away, they said.

The test-fire was successful without putting the security of neighboring countries at risk, the North’s KCNA news agency said, referring to the missile as a “Hwasong-10.” Hwasong is Korean for Mars.

“We have the sure capability to attack in an overall and practical way the Americans in the Pacific operation theater,” KCNA quoted Kim as saying.

The missile, which is fired from mobile launchers, has a design range of more than 3,000 km (1,860 miles), meaning all of Japan and the U.S. territory of Guam are potentially within reach.

A spokesman for South Korea’s military, Jeon Ha-gyu, said the second launch demonstrated “technical progress in terms of its engine capacity”. However, Jeon said it would not be meaningful to discuss whether it was a success because it was not a normal flight.

Japan and South Korea said the missile flew to a height of 1,000 km (620 miles). Experts said it appeared North Korea had deliberately raised the angle of the launch to avoid hitting any territory of Japan.

South Korea and the United States condemned the launch as an unacceptable violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions.

Japan’s Defence Minister Gen Nakatani said the launch was an indication that North Korea’s threat to Japan was intensifying.

The United Nations Security Council, which in March imposed new sanctions on the North following its fourth nuclear test in January and a long-range rocket launch in February, met at the request of the United States and Japan.

“All expressed a strong concern as well as their opposition (to) these launches,” Alexis Lamek, Deputy U.N. Ambassador of France, which holds the Security Council presidency for June, told reporters. He said he hoped a statement condemning the move could be agreed on soon.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon described North Korea’s latest ballistic missile launches as a “brazen and irresponsible act”.

North Korea had failed in at least five previous attempts to launch the intermediate-range missiles.

The North is believed to have up to 30 Musudan missiles, according to South Korean media, which officials said were first deployed around 2007, although the North had never attempted to test-fire them until this year.

North Korea and the rich, democratic South are technically still at war because their 1950-53 conflict ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty. The North regularly threatens to destroy Japan, South Korea and the United States, South Korea’s main ally.

(Additional reporting by Ju-min Park in Seoul, Michelle Nichols at the United Nations and David Brunnstrom and Idrees Ali in Washington; Editing by Toni Reinhold and Paul Tait)

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