HYUN LEE, [in NYC] hyunlee70 at gmail.com
Hyun Lee is a member of the Working Group on Peace and Demilitarization in Asia and the Pacific as well as a fellow at the Korea Policy Institute. She said today: “People who stand for peace have been saying we need to resolve the fundamental issue: There’s still a state of war between North Korea and the U.S. and there needs to be dialogue and a peace treaty. We’ve been warning that North Korea will continue to build its nuclear arsenal until that happens. … North Korea had frozen its nuclear program during the Sunshine Policy period [beginning in the late 90s] and that all crumbled with the Bush administration’s threats.”
ALICE SLATER, aslater at rcn.com
Slater is with the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and the Abolition 2000 coordinating committee. She said today: “This latest terrifying and dreadful underground nuclear test by North Korea should be a warning to the United States and the other nuclear weapons states, that the longer we continue to modernize and cling to our nuclear arsenals and promote a nuclear deterrence policy which promises catastrophic threats of nuclear retaliation if attacked, the more additional countries will be seeking to get their own ‘deterrent,’ just as North Korea has done creating ever greater threats of accidental or deliberate nuclear catastrophe. …
“It cannot have escaped the notice of North Korea that after Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program was ended in the 1990s and after Muammar Ghadafi voluntarily gave up his nuclear weapons program, they both ended up dead. …
“The only way to control the further spread of nuclear weapons and unforeseeable nuclear disaster, is for the U.S. and the other nuclear nations, Russia, UK, France, China, Israel, India, and Pakistan, to give up their nuclear weapons and negotiate a treaty for the total abolition of nuclear weapons under strict and effective international monitoring and control. Unfortunately, this won’t happen until the two nuclear behemoths at the table, the U.S. and Russia, who now have 15,000 of the 16,000 nuclear weapons on the planet, agree to do this.
“Russia has been quite clear that unless the U.S. stops its aggressive expansion of NATO up to its borders – despite promises made to Gorbachev when the wall came down that NATO would not expand beyond East Germany – and forgoes its intention to dominate and control the military use of space, but rather join with Russia and China to negotiate on their proposed space weapons ban treaty, which the U.S. has been blocking since the treaty was first tabled in Geneva in 2008, there will be no cooperation from Russia. …
“People are not aware that we still have 38,000 U.S. troops stationed on the North Korean border and there have been many bad faith sabotages of proposed negotiations to bring North Korea back into the family of nations. With Obama announcing a proposed one trillion dollars over the next thirty years for new bomb factories, delivery systems and upgraded nuclear weapons, what can we realistically expect from North Korea at this time?”
See statement and updates from the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
See “New estimates put cost of U.S. nuclear weapons upgrade at $963 billion.”
Also, see from 2013: “South Korea, U.S. sign new pact to deter North Korea nuclear threat” and “South Korea Unveils ‘Active’ Nuclear Deterrence Plan.”