WaPo: North Korea announcing the cessation of all nuclear activities
They claim to be halting missile and nuclear tests and closing testing site. This is less than a week prior to a meeting between Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in as a precursor to a meeting between Kim and Trump.
This makes zero sense. Why would a nation that has long been moving toward a goal, spent numerous resources on it and recently moved closer there than ever suddenly claim to be giving up altogether before a summit with no visible reciprocity? Normally there's a give and take, with each side making concessions. This has none of that. North Korea has received nothing and instead cedes all their bargaining chips prior to the meeting.
Either this is all a ruse and they are actually giving up nothing, or North Korea will attempt to use these proclaimed plans as a way to ask for something. I think the latter is the more likely. They are merely suspending activity until the summit to see what happens.
Otherwise something about this doesn't add up.
= new reply since forum marked as read
My conjecture...
The so-called last underground test utterly destroyed their underground test facilities to the point that there was no way to repair it. The tested nuke ran away and just fucked the whole thing up. The DPRK currently has little or no infrastructure by which to continue and little to no resources to rebuild.
After all, it was a dodgy adventure from the get go. The first tests were pretty much all fizzles, way below nuclear yields. My thinking is that they had no idea about constructing a functional initiator. They weren't happy with their low yield fizzles, so they made a really big bomb, and when their initiator design finally worked, it blew up their test facilities.
Or something like that. Anyway one looks at it, their nuke program looks like it's fucked.
And the scientists know about it all. These are things that cannot be hidden.
That's all it took.
