The North Korean leadership sounds like it's literally on the verge of going ballistic.
This week's U.N. Security Council vote to tighten sanctions against the Hermit Nation over the country's nuclear weapons program has unleashed a torrent of threats from Pyongyang. The global community has grown accustomed to the spitting of venon from North Korea, but this is different.
This is the newly nuclear-armed North Korea.
On Thursday, Kim Jong Un's regime threatened to unleash pre-emptive nuclear attacks on South Korea and the United States, vowing to turn Seoul and Washington into "seas of fire." Pyongyang's temper tantrum continued today, with breathless declarations on state-controlled media that a military hotline between the two Koreas was being severed and the 1953 armistice pact was being scrapped.
While few experts are predicting an imminent military confrontation, North Korea's possession of nuclear weapons has definitely changed the rules in the Korean Peninsula diplomacy playbook.
South Korea, which has historically tended toward restraint when responding to saber-rattling from the North, appears to be taking the threat of nuclear attack seriously. A South Korean Defense Ministry spokesman offered this blunt comment today: "If North Korea attacks South Korea with a nuclear weapon, Kim Jong-un's regime will perish from the Earth."
And seasoned North Korea experts seem unsettled, too. "I am taking this more seriously," said Daniel Snieder, a Korea specialist at Stanford University. "This is a notch up from anything we have seen before, really explicit threats that go beyond their normal overheated rhetoric."
No comments:
Post a Comment