There is a picture on the internet of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at a desk poring over documents, presumably of a strategic nature. He is surrounded by four generals, all far older than him, who are “briefing” him on the latest military situation. The caption also points to a map on the wall and translates the Korean characters:
‘Plan for the Strategic Forces to Target Mainland US’.
If ever a picture was staged for international consumption it is this one. While the map is not clear, the straight lines that are visible suggest the courses of missiles that would rain down on Hawaii and the West Coast of the American mainland and beyond.
Who do they think they are kidding?
North Korea has at best a couple of 1950s-style atom bombs, too cumbersome to be mounted on rockets, and a missile program which is literally at the hit-and-miss stage. Certainly it could put a bomb aboard one of its planes and try to drop it on Seoul or Tokyo, although the sophisticated detection systems operated by South Korea and Japan, backed by American satellite technology, would see it shot down probably before it had left North Korean airspace.
Once again Pyongyang is engaged in a war of words with the rest of the world – a war that is certainly at a higher level than previously, but words nonetheless. Of course the West must take note and make preparations, just in case some nutcase gets carried away by the rhetoric and issues the order for Mission Impossible, but apart from that remote possibility, nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula is in the realms of Alice in Wonderland.
A more interesting question is why North Korea has upped the ante in this way at this time. A lot of commentators have spent considerable energy in trying to analyse Kim’s motives on the assumption that everything that has happened stems from his orders.
I will stick to my belief that Kim is being manipulated by entrenched interests – represented by those highly-decorated gentlemen surrounding him in the picture. The young leader with fresh ideas and first-hand knowledge of the West, possibly inclined towards a more normal relationship with his country’s neighbours, is being hectored into maintaining the status quo.
After all, if tensions were relaxed what reason would there be to keep a million well-fed men and women under arms? Might the next step be disarmament with resources now in the hands of the military being transferred to the starving peasantry? Heaven forbid!
If this is the case then Kim is losing the battle against his generals. It won’t mean a great deal in the West – just a few more tabloid headlines and employment for all the so-called North Korea experts. For the poor people north of the DMZ? Well that’s another story.
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