Two very different kinds of explosions, both carefully crafted and  fitted for media consumption. First is the demolition of the Yongbyon Cooling Tower in North Korea, which, I guess is supposed to mean to someone somewhere that North Korea no longer has nuclear capability.

Wow. I guess that’s a wrap, eh?

Or, um, maybe not. From the World Tribune:

While reluctantly acknowledging ill-defined concerns about a uranium program, North Korea avoids details on just what it has been doing to develop the capability of exploding a nuclear warhead with uranium at its core.

The declaration contains no clues about the caves and redoubts, the laboratories and production facilities where North Korean scientists are believed to have begun to learn how to fabricate a warhead from highly enriched uranium. It does not admit acquisition of centrifuges from the disgraced Pakistan physicist Abdul Qadeer Khan, and it says nothing about acquiring from his network the technology if not the material or the training and experience needed to go the final steps to production of a uranium bomb.

So you mean even though they blew up that silo that there’s more to North Korea’s nuclear program?

Nor does the declaration reveal anything about proliferation of North Korea’s nuclear material, technology, training and expertise to other countries, notably to Syria, where the Israelis bombed a facility to oblivion in September. Similarly, it maintains silence on North Korea’s history of nuclear exchanges with other Middle Eastern countries, notably Iran, which has long boasted of using highly enriched uranium for electrical power while denying any military purposes.
Equally important, the declaration leaves out the question of what North Korea has done with all the plutonium produced for warheads at its nuclear complex at Yongbyon, 100 kilometers north of Pyongyang. There’s no word on how many warheads it has there, leaving intelligence analysts to repeat longstanding estimates of anywhere from six to a dozen.

So then what happened here? What’s the news, outside of this media event?

After having insisted repeatedly that North Korea had to “come clean” on its uranium program and proliferation, and also account for all the plutonium warheads, the U.S. decided to forsake that approach in the interests of advancing the protracted process of getting North Korea finally to abandon the entire program.

The North Koreans promised last October to deliver the declaration by the end of last year, but held out for six months beyond then while spurning U.S. demands for far greater disclosure and transparency. The U.S. chief negotiator, Christopher Hill, indicated in a meeting with his North Korean counterpart, Kim Kye-Gwan, in Singapore in April that simple acknowledgement of concerns might be a way out of the impasse.

Oh, and by the way, the destruction costs were at least in part  kindly covered by the United States government.  Wonder if that included a buffet for the guys in the above New York Times photo.  

The other media event of the week involves South Korean singer Lee Hyori, who will drop her 3rd album in July. Hyori is already ubiquitous in South Korea. I would compare her to Madonna in the sense that despite having some (but not a lot) of talent she’s somehow able to simultaneously be everything and  everywhere  at once — she’s sexy, yet family-friendly, which in South Korea actually covers a lot more territory than Madonna kind of doing the same in both America and England.

The campaign in advance of her new album is called  ”It’s Hyorish,” which if you say it out loud sounds kind of like whorish. But most Koreans don’t know the word “whore,” so to many it sounds more like “stylish,” a word most Koreans know. I think it’s meant to mean both. Amazing.

Part of this new campaign is a supposedly “leaked” video. What could possibly be leaked about this very run-of-the-mill record label album preview clip is beyond me. But the fact that it’s leaked has created enough of a stir to get it into some of the regular Korean news reports.

I have much less of a problem with Hyori’s promotion company MNet passing off the release of a promotional video as a “leak” than I do the destruction of the Yongbyon Cooling Tower. One is a pop singer, the other concerns nuclear warfare. One was conducted by a South Korean promotion company,  the other seems to be a joint effort by the most powerful government in the world and one of the world’s most ruthless dictators.