Last year, the Obama administration announced to the world that it was planning to pursue a new Asia/Pacific-oriented national security strategy. Since then, North Korea has countered with a strategy of its own. In December, Pyongyang successfully launched a multistage intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying a warhead-sized payload to the U.S. mainland. On Feb. 12, the North Koreans tested an improved-design nuclear weapon.
After the test, Pyongyang announced that despite tightened United Nations sanctions that theoretically went into force last month, its latest nuclear test bolstered its defenses against U.S. “hostility.” In a lengthy broadcast on the communist dictatorship’s Korean Central News Agency, a government spokesman claimed that countries that abandoned nuclear weapons in response to U.S. pressure have suffered “tragic consequences” and that North Korea’s nuclear program is “farsighted.”
Libya is the only nation known to have quit an ongoing nuclear program in the past 20 years. Moammar Gadhafi dropped out of the nuclear weapons club after Saddam Hussein was dragged from a spider hole in 2003. A former intelligence official tells me that Pyongyang’s reference to “countries” — plural — is likely “hyperbolic propaganda, but there is no doubt Gadhafi is dead.”
The latest rant from the hermit kingdom is a diatribe against the annual month-long series of U.S.-South Korean air, naval and ground exercises set to begin next week. On Thursday, a North Korean “diplomat” at the United Nations threatened his South Korean counterpart with “final destruction” if the U.N. tries to impose further sanctions. In a surreal twist on bizarre behavior, the confrontation apparently took place during a session of the U.N. Conference on Disarmament.
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