The First Strike

[vinnieponte]

US preparing strategy against North Korea

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States is preparing strategies to choke off nuclear-armed North Korea's few remaining sources of income, a report said.

President George W. Bush's administration began developing the "tool kit" of techniques to pressure North Korea before last week's announcement by Pyongyang that it possessed nuclear weapons, The New York Times reported.

North Korea last Thursday made an unambiguous declaration it is a nuclear weapons state and spurned six party talks aimed at defusing a more than two-year-old standoff with the United States over its atomic programs.

The new US strategies would intensify and coordinate efforts to track and freeze financial transactions that allegedly enabled Kim Jong Il's Stalinist regime to profit from counterfeiting, drug trafficking and the sale of missile and other weapons technology, the paper said.

The steps might evolve into a broader strategy against the regime if China and South Korea particularly could be convinced that North Korea's announcement last Thursday meant it must finally be forced to choose between disarmament and even deeper isolation, the New York Times quoted intelligence officials and policy makers as saying.

One official called them the "new instruments of pressure" against the reclusive and hardline Communist state.

China and South Korea have refused to use their economic might against Pyongyang, which relies heavily on them for investments and trade, but have come under renewed pressure after North Korea boasted its possession of nuclear weapons and that it would stay away from the six party talks.

Washington is the chief sponsor of the protracted talks designed to wean North Korea away from its nuclear program and defuse the crisis in the Korean peninsula.

But the parties to the talks -- the two Koreas, the United States, Japan, Russia and China -- are divided on how to reward and rein in Pyongyang