North Korea Want One-on-One

I did not blog anything about the North Korean claim yesterday, but did make some comments about my opinion being it is "blackmail" plain and simply - now we have it; "We go a nuke you got to talk to us"... Interestingly they are only want bilateral talks, go figure same thing President Bush's opposition talked about - you think it is a move to discredit the President, you think?

Presidents have been second guessed for half a century in regard to North Korea - the premise of the second guessing is that those doing the second guessing assume North Korea is trustworthy - they are not - it is a totalitarian government based on terrorizing it's citizens and the dictator is a total self absorb nut. Of course, this fact makes it even more dangerous if indeed there is a nuke - anyway here is the story.

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea has demanded bilateral talks with the United States to defuse tension created by its announcement that it is a nuclear power, the communist state's U.N. envoy said in a South Korean newspaper interview published Friday.

Han Sung Ryol, a senior diplomat at North Korea's U.N. delegation in New York, was the first North Korean official to speak to outside news media since Pyongyang's Foreign Ministry defied the United States and its allies by declaring Thursday that it has nuclear weapons, its first public announcement that it has weapons.

North Korea said the weapons are a deterrent against a U.S. invasion and that it doesn't intend to join six-nation disarmament talks any time soon.

"We will return to the six-nation talks when we see a reason to do so and the conditions are ripe," Han told Seoul's Hankyoreh newspaper in a Thursday interview in New York. "If the United States moves to have direct dialogue with us, we can take that as a signal that the United States is changing its hostile policy toward us."

I really do not mean to trivialize this - but I do want to call a duck a duck - it is blackmail!