Princess starts school with handshakes all round
North Korea has acquired material for ten more nuclear bombs in the 18 months that de-nuclearisation talks with the United States have been dragging on, giving it enough for 40 in total, according to the former head of America’s nuclear laboratory.
Siegfried Hecker warns in an essay written with other experts on North Korea that President Donald Trump’s diplomatic engagement with Kim Jong-un is at a crucial stage and that delay is allowing the rogue state to increase its nuclear stockpile. The authors urge the US government to abandon demands for a comprehensive deal, which scuttled a summit between Trump and Kim in February, and to settle instead for a series of smaller, incremental steps that would gradually build trust.
‘‘The [diplomatic] process is now on life support, with time and circumstances working against it,’’ they write on the 38 North website run by the Stimson Centre think tank in Washington. ‘‘The longer the United States waits for what it thinks is a better deal, the more it risks that the opportunity for such action will slip away – and that future negotiators will face an even tougher predicament, with much more advanced [North Korean] nuclear and missile capabilities.’’
In 2010 Hecker, former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, became one of the few foreigners to have entered the stronghold of North Korea’s nuclear programme, its nuclear power plant at Yongbyon, which produces the ingredients for its nuclear warheads.
In September 2017 North Korea carried out its sixth and largest nuclear test so far. The device was as powerful as a hydrogen bomb, with more than ten times the energy of the weapons that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Soon afterwards, it successfully test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile able to reach the US mainland.
Since then, following a shift to diplomacy with South Korea and the US, Kim, below, has kept a promise made to Trump at their first summit in Singapore last year not to test any more nuclear bombs or ballistic missiles. After the failure of the second summit in Vietnam in February, and despite a third brief meeting in South Korea in June, however, diplomacy has stalled.
Based on the capacities of Yongbyon, however, Professor Hecker believes that the north has continued to manufacture warheads. ‘‘Over the past 18 months it has likely added about ten bombs’ worth of fissile material to the roughly 30 bombs’ worth it possessed in late 2017,’’ he writes. The Vietnam talks failed after Trump’s insistence on an ‘‘all or nothing’’ agreement on denuclearisation, by which the North Koreans would give up their nuclear arsenal and all stocks of chemical and biological weapons.
Kim said that the two sides must first build trust through a series of lesser agreements. He offered to close the Yongbyon plant in return for the partial removal of international economic sanctions but Trump refused.
The two leaders left Hanoi on good terms, personally at least, and met again in June at the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea. But despite agreeing to hold future talks, no further meetings have taken place, in part because of North Korean anger over joint US-South Korean military exercises last month.
‘‘Washington continues to profess an interest in returning to the negotiating table but has not adopted a new approach with potential for progress, while Pyongyang appears increasingly uninterested in even sitting down at the table,’’ Hecker wrote. – The Times Britain’s Princess Charlotte has begun her first day at school with a welcome handshake from staff.
The four-year-old follows in the footsteps of big brother Prince George, who has been attending Thomas’s Battersea for the past two years.
Charlotte arrived with her family, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and George by car as other parents dropped off their children at the south London school.
‘‘First day – she’s very excited,’’ a smiling Prince William said as the family entered the school. Charlotte’s fees for the school year are expected to cost around £18,915 (NZ$36,500).
Kate missed George’s first day at Thomas’s Battersea in 2017 as she was suffering from severe morning sickness while pregnant with Prince Louis.
Head of the lower school Helen Haslem was waiting to greet her new pupil and shook hands with the princess, who will be known as Charlotte Cambridge to staff and schoolmates.
Kensington Palace’s official Twitter account shared footage of the family arriving at the school.
The video of the two Cambridge children dressed in their uniforms and meeting Haslem had already been viewed a million times.
According to the school website, Thomas’s aims for all pupils to ‘‘become the best that he or she can be.’’
The school states its most important rule is to ‘‘be kind.’’ The school teaches 560 boys and girls between the ages of 4 and 13.
Two years ago police reviewed security arrangements at the school after a 40-year-old woman was arrested on suspicion of attempted burglary there shortly after George started.
The woman accepted a caution for causing a nuisance on school property.
Charlotte, the greatgranddaughter of Queen Elizabeth, is fourth-in-line to the British throne, after – in ascending order – six-year-old George, her father William and her grandfather Prince Charles. – Agencies