Saturday 30th of March 2024

cleaning dunny-diplomacy between diplomats...

diplomacy

Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop has said there is a "powerful argument" that US President Donald Trump's threat to scrap the Iran nuclear deal could imperil efforts to negotiate a peaceful outcome with North Korea.

In a significant sharpening of Australia's public rhetoric on the Obama-era Iran agreement, Ms Bishop said she had asked US officials, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, how they would counter the argument that North Korea could not trust the US if it walked away from previous international agreements.

read more:

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/bishop-warns-trump...

 

 

hiroshima in vain...

As North Korea races to build a weapon that for the first time could threaten American cities, its neighbors are debating whether they need their own nuclear arsenals.

The North’s rapidly advancing capabilities have scrambled military calculations across the region, and doubts are growing the United States will be able to keep the atomic genie in the bottle.

For the first time in recent memory, there is a daily argument raging in both South Korea and Japan — sometimes in public, more often in private — about the nuclear option, driven by worry that the United States might hesitate to defend the countries if doing so might provoke a missile launched from the North at Los Angeles or Washington.

In South Korea, polls show 60 percent of the population favors building nuclear weapons. And nearly 70 percent want the United States to reintroduce tactical nuclear weapons for battlefield use, which were withdrawn a quarter-century ago.

read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/28/world/asia/north-korea-nuclear-weapons-japan-south-korea.html

Say yer prayers ya long eared galoot!...

 

Russia has accused the United States of trying to provoke North Korean leader Kim Jong-un into "flying off the handle" over his missile programme to hand Washington a pretext to destroy his country.

Key points:
  • Russia's Foreign Minister says US is handling the situation in a dangerously provocative way
  • US and South Korean air forces are scheduled to hold a regular joint drill early next month
  • Sergei Lavrov complains US is "totally ignoring" UN demand for talks with North Korea

 

In some of his most robust comments on the subject to date, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also flatly rejected a US call to cut ties with Pyongyang over its nuclear and ballistic missile programme and said US policy towards North Korea was deeply flawed.

Tensions on the Korean Peninsula have flared after North Korea said it had successfully tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile on Wednesday in a "breakthrough" that put the US mainland within range of its nuclear weapons.

Russia has condemned the test, like others before it, as "a provocation", but Mr Lavrov said the way the United States was handling the situation was dangerously provocative.

"The latest US actions look designed to deliberately provoke Pyongyang into taking new extreme action," Mr Lavrov told reporters in Belarus, according to a Russian Foreign Ministry transcript.

Mr Lavrov said he was referring to joint US-South Korean military exercises planned for December, which he said US officials had intimated to Russia would not take place until spring to open a window for tensions to be defused.

"We were encouraged by that approach," he said.

"And then suddenly … they announced large-scale exercises in December.

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-30/russia-accuses-us-of-trying-to-pro...

 

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