South Korea Accuses Neighbor of Torpedoing Warship

Saber rattling has a negative effect on nuclear talks

On again, off again nuclear disarmament talks appear to be
off again following the revelation that a North Korean
torpedo sank a South Korean warship.

South Korea's foreign minister said yesterday that
investigators have analyzed debris from a torpedo that sank
a 1,200-ton warship near its disputed western maritime
border with South Korea and identified it as pieces of a
North Korean weapon.

The attack cost 46 lives after rescuers fished 58 sailors
out of the Yellow Sea. The vessel was on a routine patrol
at the time of the attack.

Only a truce of cessation of hostilities brokered in 1953 by
the United Nations is in place following the two nations' 3
year war which saw intervention by such superpowers as The
People's Republic of China and the United States.

In that conflict, massive human waves of Red Chinese
soldiers attacked American troops who mowed them down with
automatic and small arms fire. The two Korean nations
routinely meet every so often to agree to disagree on the
terms of a peace treaty and then adjourn abruptly.

An American State Department spokesman said the nuclear
disarmament talks are definitely on hold pending the outcome
of a South Korean assertion made yesterday that it intends
to confront North Korea in the U.N. Security Council.

The announcement by Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan came amid
increasing military speculation that a similar attack caused
the blowout and sinking of the drilling vessel Deepwater
Horizon a mere 50 miles distant from the shores of Louisiana
on Earth Day, April 20. Crude continues to gush from the
damaged wellhead, though British Petroleum engineers have
been able to mitigate the spill to some extent.