- CBN News has uncovered more satellite evidence that North Korea is
working to perfect a rocket capable of hitting the United States mainland-something
that has been confirmed by Japan's defense agency this week.
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- Despite a continuing famine, this week
North Korea pledged to build up its military even further. Now, a report
by the Congressional Research Service explains where the North Koreans
are getting some of the money for their military. Starvation has killed
as much as ten percent of North Korea's population in the past three years,
yet North Korea continues to advance its nuclear missile program, and threatens
to annihilate the United States.
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- How does the North Korean regime manage
not only to survive, but add to its military power? The answer is crime.
North Korea is raising huge sums of cash by selling home grown opium and
methamphetamines around the world, and by passing millions in counterfeit
U-S currency-even as it scares the west into giving it food and cash. "The
North Koreans know how to play brinkmanship. It's always to get concessions.
They know how to play Washington, D.C., the Clinton Administration, and
they continuously get concessions," says Dr. William Taylor, one of
America's foremost experts on North Korea.
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- It's estimated that North Korea brings
in about 100-million dollars a year by drug dealing, smuggling and other
criminal enterprises. South Korea says the North prints 15-million dollars
in counterfeit U-S currency each year. And criminal proceeds undoubtedly
helped fund the Taepo-Dong I intermediate range missile, under development.
Work also continues on a longer range missile, the Taepo-Dong II, which
someday could hit targets in the western U-S. Satellite imagery shows a
very large wind tunnel complex, almost the size of a football field, for
testing a very large rocket. It also shows a launch pad with a road leading
underground where missiles are stored.
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- Last year CBN News reported on an underground
nuclear complex near Yongbyon where North Korea is hiding a revived nuclear
weapons program. It's 25 miles from the nuclear production facility in
Yongbyon. Under a 1994 agreement, this plutonium production site was supposed
to be shut down. But photos from 1997 show the same type of pollution in
the river as it did before the treaty. An expert has concluded the plant
was still in operation.
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- While North Koreans starve, and the U-S
gives tens of millions of dollars in food aid, it's reported that Pyongyang
has been using farms to grow poppies for opium, rather than food crops.
"It's a country that is starving. It can exist, the regime can exist,
only on the largesse of the United States, Japan, South Korea, none of
whom want a war on the Korean Peninsula," says Taylor.
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- So aid continues to the North, and Dr.
Taylor warns that it has become the number one threat to our national security.
"The North Koreans are known to have - this is clear - chemical and
biological warheads. The CIA says they have already extracted enough fissionable
nuclear material to build one or two nuclear devices. They are away by
about three years, from being able to hit anywhere among the U-S 50 states.
And we have no missile defense.
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- The North Koreans understand all this,
and they're playing it for what it's worth." Taylor says, too, if
the world would only cut off the aid, the North Korean government would
fall. But that's unlikely, because of North Korea's campaign of intimidation,
and the world's fear.
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