LYCOS RETRIEVER 
North Korea: South Korean
built 628 days ago
* The Korean People's Army (KPA) of North Korea conducted some 630 chemical weapons training exercises using live chemical agents between 1980 and 1991. Estimates of KPA chemical agent stockpiles are in the range from 1,000 to 5,000 tons.
Source:
Actually, the North Korean cheating wasn’t the least bit surprising. The CIA had thought North Korea wouldn’t comply with the agreement all along. “Based on North Korea’s past behavior,” the CIA reported in 1995, “the [intelligence] community agrees it would dismantle its known program, [only] if it had covertly developed another source of fissile material.”
Source:
Published in Seoul, the Korea Times, in an editorial, appears to be glad that "[t]he closure of the Yongbyon reactor is expected to open the way for the North's complete scrapping of its nuclear-weapons programs." However, the newspaper adds that "South Koreans are uneasy about the proposal because the North has long been trying to have direct talks with the U.S. and exclude the South from discussions of military matters and peace settlements."
Source:
Although there are no indigenous minorities in North Korea, there is a small Chinese community (about 50,000) and some 1,800 Japanese wives who accompanied the roughly 93,000 Koreans returning to the North from Japan between 1959 and 1962. Although dialects exist, the Korean spoken throughout the peninsula is mutually comprehensible. In North Korea, the Korean alphabet (hangul) is used exclusively.
Source:
In the immediate aftermath of the Korean War, the South raised a 328-foot flagpole; the North responded with a 525-foot pole, then put a flag on it whose dry weight is 595 pounds. The North built a two-story building in the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom; the South built a three-story one. The North then added another story to its building. “The land of one-upmanship,” is how one U.S. Army sergeant describes the DMZ, or demilitarized zone. The two sides once held a meeting in Panmunjom that went on for eleven hours. Because there was no formal agreement about when to take a bathroom break, neither side budged.
Source:
South Korea needs to facilitate an infusion of resources from the outside world into the North with a view toward helping it achieve tangible results from its economic reforms while keeping adverse side effects under control. The South ... needs to play a leading role in resolving the North Korean nuclear issue, which in turn will lead to an improvement in the North's relations with the outside world and enable it to make significant headway in its economic reforms and rejuvenation. The successful conclusion of a fourth round of six-party talks in Beijing in September 2005, in which Seoul has played an active role, suggests that economic and other exchanges between the two Koreas can help enhance the security of the Korean peninsula.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
South Korean