North Korea Getting Blustery
By North Korea, facing international sanction for this week’s nuclear test, threatened on Wednesday to attack the South after Seoul joined a U.S.-led initiative to check vessels suspected of carrying equipment for weapons of mass destruction.
The threat came after South Korean media reported Pyongyang had restarted a plant that makes weapons-grade plutonium.
U.S. President Barack Obama is working to form a united response to Monday’s nuclear test, widely denounced as a major threat to stability that violates U.N. resolutions and brings the reclusive North closer to having a reliable nuclear bomb.
A North Korean army spokesman reiterated that the country was no longer bound by the armistice signed at the end of the 1950-53 Korean War because Washington had ignored its responsibility as a signatory by drawing Seoul into the anti-proliferation effort.
Attention deprived behavior? Yes, but you do sometimes worry that actors within North Korea’s byzantine governance system will get rhetorically locked into certain policy options. Nevertheless, a North Korea attack on the South would be tantamount to national suicide, and I don’t believe that countries regularly commit national suicide. The issue of the day is the Proliferation Security Initiative, which is probably the only good idea John Bolton ever came up with; it’s an international regime to monitor maritime export of illicit or illegal arms from North Korea (its primary target) to international customers. Since proliferation of nuclear and ballistic missile technology is probably the biggest threat that North Korea poses (while fears of export of an actual nuclear weapon are kind of silly, the export of machinery and ballistic missiles has already taken place), South Korea’s participation in PSI makes sense to me. It’s also possible that the nuclear test may push China to join PSI; Beijing has thus far been reluctant for reasons that have little to do with North Korea.