President Bush Discusses North Korea

President Bush Discusses North Korea
From the White House Rose Garden
Thursday, June 26, 2008...

THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. The policy of the United States is a Korean Peninsula free of all nuclear weapons. This morning, we moved a step closer to that goal, when North Korean officials submitted a declaration of their nuclear programs to the Chinese government as part of the six-party talks.

The United States has no illusions about the regime in Pyongyang. We remain deeply concerned about North Korea's human rights abuses, uranium enrichment activities, nuclear testing and proliferation, ballistic missile programs, and the threat it continues to pose to South Korea and its neighbors.

Yet we welcome today's development as one step in the multi-step process laid out by the six-party talks between North Korea, China, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United States.

Last year, North Korea pledged to disable its nuclear facilities. North Korea has begun disabling its Yongbyon nuclear facility -- which was being used to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. This work is being overseen by officials from the United States and the IAEA. And to demonstrate its commitment, North Korea has said it will destroy the cooling tower of the Yongbyon reactor in front of international television cameras tomorrow...
Read the full Transcript HERE

Above link has the full video

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FOXNews.com has this report on today’s events and they start it off like this... Pledging "action for action," President Bush on Thursday said North Korea has demonstrated a commitment to dismantling its nuclear weapons program and will be rewarded by being removed from the U.S. list of state sponsors and having trade sanctions lifted... The president spoke hours after North Korea submitted its long-awaited declaration detailing its nuclear weapons activities. The government said that it would televise the demolition of the cooling tower at its Yongbyon nuclear facility on Friday, and turned over documents to China about its plutonium core and waste activities...
Read this report in full at link below...
Bush Offers Carrots in Exchange for North Korea Nukes Declaration
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AFP.google.com has this take on the news... North Korea handed over details of its nuclear programmes Thursday, paving the way for its removal from the US terrorism blacklist amid years of efforts to persuade the North to abandon the atom bomb... Six months behind schedule, officials delivered the dossier to China -- the host country for the six-nation talks since 2003 that have worked to entice the North to exchange nuclear weapons for aid and diplomatic concessions...
Read the rest at link below...
NKorea hands over nuclear dossier
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EarthTimes.org reports it this way... North Korea's move on Thursday to declare details of its nuclear programme brought the country one step closer to becoming only the world's third nation, after South Africa and Libya, to dismantle a nuclear weapons programme. The long-awaited move, in which China led the mediations, has been anticipated for months...
Read this report in full at link below...
North Korea revives optimism of third post-nuclear state

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North Korea has disappointed us so many times in the past... it’s hard to get too excided over anything from them. But... with fingers crossed... just maybe this will be the time when we will be able to start off with new... meaningful relations with North Korea...
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AubreyJ.........

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UPDATE:
Friday, June 27, 2008

RIA Novosti website has this report up early this morning... Russia's Foreign Ministry welcomed on Friday the demolition of a cooling tower in North Korea's main nuclear reactor complex at Yongbyon... South Korean television earlier reported that North Korea destroyed the 20-meter (60-foot) cooling tower shortly after 4:00 p.m. (7:00 GMT)...
Read the full report at link below...
Russia welcomes destruction of reactor cooling tower in N. Korea

CNN.com has this report... North Korea on Friday destroyed a water cooling tower at a facility where officials acknowledge they extracted plutonium to build nuclear weapons, CNN's Chief International Correspondent Christiane Amanpour reported from the scene... The massive implosion, which came at about 5pm local time Friday at the Yongbyon facility, was intended to be a powerful public symbol of a move to end nuclear activities by the Communist nation once branded a member of an "axis of evil" by U.S. President George W. Bush... The destruction of the highly visible symbol of North Korea's long-secret nuclear program came just a day after the country released details of its program...
Read this report in full at link below...
N. Korea destroys nuclear reactor tower
The above link has photos, videos and more

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North Korea Destroys Nuclear Reactor Tower

Video posted on LiveLeak by komakazzi
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