So is an actually shooting War with North Korea on the horizon?...
N. Korea Declares War Truce Deal Dead
March 11, 2013
Global Security Newswire
North
Korea on Monday declared it would no longer be bound by the truce
agreement that ended fighting in the Korean War, Kyodo News reported.
The
1953 armistice is "completely nullified from today" and North Korea's
weapons are primed for use at any moment, the state-controlled Rodong
Sinmun newspaper said.
Pyongyang is upset with new U.N. Security
Council sanctions imposed on last week that take aim at the North's
currency smuggling and other criminal enterprises as well as its ability
to acquire materials for its WMD programs. The economic penalties were
punishment for the country's February nuclear test -- its third in less
than a decade.
North Korea since 1991 has threatened on more than
six occasions to void the truce or questioned its validity, Peterson
Institute for International Economics North Korea expert Stephan Haggard
wrote in a recent web post. The Stalinist state in that time period,
however, has only mounted small-scale conventional attacks against the
South. Still, some observers are concerned the young Kim Jong Un regime
might be confident enough in its nuclear deterrent to view the Korean
War truce as no longer necessary, the New York Times reported on Sunday.
The
North on Monday also severed a military communication line with Seoul
against a backdrop of ongoing large-scale U.S.-South Korean military
maneuvers, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Pyongyang's armed
forces are carrying out their own maneuvers but they do not appear to
represent a looming danger, according to Seoul. "There has been no
unusual movement spotted in North Korea. It has been quiet so far," an
unidentified South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff spokesman said.
"They’re
giving all the motions to make us believe that some sort of provocation
is coming,” Center for Naval Analyses North Korea specialist Ken Gause
told the Washington Post. "Provocations are not necessarily imminent,
but the probability is higher . . . and the ability to manage a
provocation is much more difficult if they have withdrawn from the
communication channels that existed under the armistice."
China
on Saturday said its vote in favor of the latest Security Council
sanctions did not mean it was turning its back on its longtime ally, the
Times separately reported. "We always believe that sanctions are not
the end of the Security Council actions, or are sanctions the
fundamental way to resolve the relevant issues," Chinese Foreign
Minister Yang Jiechi said to journalists.
U.N. Secretary General
Ban Ki-moon in released comments on Saturday condemned the North for its
recent warnings of nuclear and other attacks on South Korea and the
United States, according to Reuters. He also called on the leaders of
two Koreas to "discuss seriously how to encourage national
reconciliation and to reduce tensions on the Korean Peninsula."
South
Korea's new unification minister, Ryoo Kihl-jae, said his government is
still prepared to engage with Pyongyang despite its bellicose rhetoric,
the Yonhap News Agency reported on Monday.
7 comments:
He's a 28 year-old punk whose private education in Switzerland did not dissuade him that he would inherit a great power. But NK makes other people more miserable than China, so they haven't put a cap in his ass. Yet.
He's a 28 year-old punk...
March 11, 2013 at 8:36 PM
...with nuclear weapons.
Two comments??!! Tells you something about the worldview of the posters on this blog. I wonder how many are actually LANL or LLNL professional staff, and how many are just employees who have no interest in the world as it affects the US nuclear weapon complex, or how many are just outsiders pretending otherwise. If you are the former you really should be concerned about this subject.
Good point. This is a subject that you'd think would get everybody fired up.
Could be it's the one thing that everybody on this blog agrees with.
Personally, I find it hard to think about, because the situation is so irrational. I still fail to correctly predict NK's response about 95% of the time.
You make it completely obvious that you can sterilize all of NK, and then NK comes back and threatens you. I just don't get it.
You make it completely obvious that you can sterilize all of NK, and then NK comes back and threatens you. I just don't get it.
March 20, 2013 at 1:17 PM
It's a perfectly legitimate Pavlovian response. NK threatens the people who are perfectly capable of destroying them, and the people who are perfectly capable of destroying them provide more international aid.
Capability isn't the same as will. Unfortunately.
The trick is to cut off the crazy head without killing the snake. No one has figured out how to do that yet, and nuclear arsenals aren't the answer (duh). If you find it difficult to imagine the poverty of the people of NK, just go to one of those websites showing the Earth at night. These poor folk are living in the kind of feudalistic squalor typical of the Dark Ages in Western Europe. AND, AND, every sanction we sanctimonious nuclear snobs levy on NK drives the ordinary people deeper into misery.
If you think the NK dictator does anything based on his peoples' suffering, you are delusional. We couple sanctions with more aid, so it is obviated.
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