Word: pyongyang
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...diplomat. However, a senior Bush Administration official says a proposed resolution before the U.N. Security Council might provide the cover needed to intercept shipments of missiles, which currently are legal to sell under international law. Even with wide-ranging support, stopping North Korea's arms traffic is dangerous. Pyongyang has repeatedly threatened to attack South Korea if economic sanctions are imposed. In a typically bellicose statement sent to the U.N. Security Council on June 27, North Korea warned that U.S.-backed sanctions or blockades would "return the Korean peninsula to a state...
...trade with the regime. On May 8, for example, Tokyo police raided a trading company called Meishin, which is run by members of Japan's North Korean community. Police accused Meishin of exporting transformers whose workaday function of regulating electrical current could have had useful applications in Pyongyang's uranium-enrichment program...
...Meanwhile, the chief of Seishin, another Japanese company, was arrested along with four employees in June over the export of grinding machines called jet mills to Iran in 1999-2000. The company is also suspected of selling a jet mill to Pyongyang in the mid-1990s, according to the Japanese media, and police are investigating to determine whether any more recent sales were made to the North. Jet mills crush solid objects with highly pressurized air, and are most commonly used to pulverize plastics and pharmaceuticals. They can, however, also boost missile thrust by turning solid rocket fuel into fine...
...Japan isn't the only shopping mall for North Korea's military machine. Pyongyang gets precursor chemicals for its chemical and biological weapons programs from Europe, China and Russia, according to U.S. and South Korean officials. The freighter that took the North Korean Scuds to Yemen returned to the North via Germany, loading up with a shipment of sodium cyanide?a chemical used in metal plating and gold extraction that can also be used to make nerve gas. That shipment was blocked by German and French authorities. Germany also recently blocked a North Korea-bound consignment of aluminum tubes...
...Tokyo is trying nonetheless to enhance screening of exports to the North. Ferry runs between the two countries by the Mangyongbong-92, a North Korean ship suspected of transporting spies and drugs into Japan and weapons parts out, were suspended by Pyongyang in June after Tokyo deployed an army of inspectors to Niigata dockyards to scour the vessel. Japan has also blacklisted all trade with Pyongyang's Central Zoo, which is suspected of being a military front that uses its amusement-park rides as an excuse to procure electrical parts for missiles and other arms...