LYCOS RETRIEVER 
North Korea: South Korea
built 655 days ago
Given that North Korea’s army of 1.2 million soldiers has been increasingly deployed toward the South Korean border, the Korean peninsula looms as potentially the next American military nightmare. In 1980, 40 percent of North Korean combat forces were deployed south of Pyongyang near the DMZ; by 2003, more than 70 percent were. As the saying goes among American soldiers, “There is no peacetime in the
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" An early morning firefight Tuesday in disputed waters in the Yellow Sea receded into a verbal clash, as North Korea demanded an apology after South Korea sank one of its warships. Each side said the other fired first. All 17 aboard the North Korean warship were killed, said the South Korean state-owned Yonhap news agency. A U.S. defense official said as many as 30 North Koreans were killed. A South Korean army helicoptor with injured sailors on board lifts off headed to Seoul's military hospital following a confrontation with North Korean navy. Five North Korean patrol boats ... were ..."
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As John Feffer's new book shows, Bush administration crisis-mongering about North Korea is no more believable than its intelligence on Iraq. The North Korean reactor at Yongbyon is based on fifty-year-old designs and, incredibly, still uses vacuum tubes. North Korea spends $20 a year per soldier, whereas South Korea, whose economy is 26 times larger, spends $163,000 per soldier. The Koreans themselves are fully capable of unifying the Korean peninsula-if only the Pentagon would let them. Feffer's analysis is the most reliable, balanced report available on the Korean 'threat.'"
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North Korea's geography, much like South Korea's, consists of resource rich mountainous terrain ideal for placement of anti-aircraft artillery (for peaceful, defensive reasons only). The slopes ... receive excellent snowfall in the winter, allowing for excellent ski conditions. Sadly, the North Korean Government lost all of it's money playing poker last night with Azerbijan, Poland, and Uzbekistan and cannot afford to construct ski areas. The highlight of North Korean ski history was Kim Jong Ill's roommate from Notre Dame's performance in the Men's Freestyle event in the 1976 Winter Olympics wherein he landed a switch 720 misty flip to method air. The technique was without parallel and the women swooned. The Great Leader, however, was robbed of victory when the Pope called upon his divine powers to land a switch triple back flip to indy nosebone (see: Politics).
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South Korea, Japan, and China have all urged the United States to resolve the nuclear issue through direct talks with North Korea. The United States says it will not offer aid or other enticements to persuade the North to give up its nuclear ambitions and will talk to the North only in a multilateral forum. In April, U.S. and North Korean officials, along with a Chinese delegation, met in Beijing for the first high-level, face-to-face discussions since the crisis began. During the meeting, a North Korean official reportedly told a U.S. envoy that North Korea had at least one nuclear weapon. The official ... announced that Pyongyang had begun reprocessing 8,000 spent fuel rods from the Yongbyon reactor into weapons-grade plutonium--enough, experts say, to produce five or six nuclear bombs within months.
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A US envoy who will visit North Korea this week said on Tuesday it must make a &"complete and correct&" declaration of its nuclear programs to get stalled disarmament talks moving. Sung Kim, director of the State Department's Office of Korean Affairs, said he would spend two or three days in Pyongyang for talks aimed at making progress in six-nation negotiations. The North missed a December 31 deadline, set by a six-party deal, to declare all its nuclear activities. It says it submitted a list in November but the US insists it must account fully for a suspected secret highly enriched uranium weapons program. Kim arrived in South Korea on Tuesday for consultations and will go on to China on Wednesday and Pyongyang the following day.
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