N Korea threatens US with first strike
Pyongyang asserts right to pre-emptive attack as tensions rise over American build-up

North Korea is entitled to launch a pre-emptive strike against the US rather than wait until the American military have finished with Iraq, the North's foreign ministry told the Guardian yesterday.

Warning that the current nuclear crisis is worse than that in 1994, when the peninsula stood on the brink of oblivion, a ministry spokesman called on Britain to use its influence with Washington to avert war.

"The United States says that after Iraq, we are next", said the deputy director Ri Pyong-gap, "but we have our own countermeasures. Pre-emptive attacks are not the exclusive right of the US."
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Talking Points Memo
If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? Or, in our case, if there's a crisis on the Korean Peninsula and the White House doesn't pay any attention, does it even really matter?
That is a proposition the Bush administration seems increasingly determined to put to the test.

Watch very closely what's happening.

According to American satellite intelligence, North Korea is now more or less openly hauling those 8000 spent nuclear fuel rods off to be reprocessed into weapons grade plutonium and then, presumably, into nuclear warheads.

Let's be clear, this is exactly the act we were prepared to go to war in 1994 to prevent.
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