honghong liu's blog: "pert2012"

Angry North Korea threatens retaliation, nuclear test expected

(Reuters) - A bristling North Korea on Wednesday said it was ready to retaliate in the face of international condemnation over its failed rocket launch, increasing the likelihood the hermit state will push ahead with a third nuclear test. Cheap Karen Millen

The North also ditched an agreement to allow back inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. That followed a U.S. decision, in response to the rocket launch it says was a disguised long-range missile test, to break off a deal earlier this year to provide the impoverished state with food aid.

Pyongyang called the U.S. move a hostile act and said it was no longer bound by its February 29 agreement with Washington, dashing any hopes that new leader Kim Jong-un would soften a foreign policy that has for years been based on the threat of an atomic arsenal to leverage concessions out of regional powers.  Karen Millen Dresses

"We have thus become able to take necessary retaliatory measures, free from the agreement," the official KCNA news agency said, without specifying what actions it might take.

Many analysts expect that with its third test, North Korea will for the first time try a nuclear device using highly enriched uranium, something it was long suspected of developing but which it only publicly admitted to about two years ago.

The Swiss-educated Kim Jong-un, who is in his late 20s, rose to power after his father's death last December. The country's propaganda machine has since made much of his physical likeness to his revered grandfather, the first leader and now North Korea's "eternal president".

But hopes that the young Kim could prove to be a reformer have faded fast. In his first public speech on Sunday, the chubby leader made clear that he would stick to the pro-military policies of his father that helped push the country into a devastating famine in the 1990s.

Kim is surrounded by the same coterie of generals that advised his father and he oversaw Sunday's mass military parade. Buy Karen Millen

He urged his people and 1.2 million strong armed forces to "move forward to final victory" as he lauded his grandfather's and father's achievements in building the country's military.

Siegfried Hecker, a U.S. nuclear expert who in 2010 saw a uranium enrichment facility in North Korea, believes the state has 24-42 kg (53 to 95 pounds) of plutonium, enough for four to eight bombs.

Production of plutonium at its Yongbyon reprocessing plant has been halted since 2009 and producing highly enriched uranium would simultaneously allow Pyongyang to push ahead with its nuclear power program and augment its small plutonium stocks that could be used for weapons, Hecker says. Karen Millen Outlet