North Korea continues to grow as a source for international concern amid reports of shots fired along the DMZ and its announcement that it plans to conduct a nuclear weapons test despite warnings from the United States and the international community.
The big breaking news story was about shots fired across the DMZ. The AP:
Shots were fired yesterday along the heavily armed no man’s land separating the divided Koreas as regional tensions mounted in anticipation of communist North Korea carrying out its first atomic bomb test.
North Korea’s neighbors applauded a UN Security Council statement warning the country not to carry out the test, an unprecedented event that some predict could happen as early as today.
South Korea backed the statement and Japan said it would seek punitive measures if Pyongyang does not comply.
On the frontier between North and South Korea, South Korean soldiers fired warning shots after five North Korean soldiers crossed a boundary in the Demilitar-ized Zone separating the countries’ forces, South Korean military officials said.
It was unclear whether the North Korean advance — which happened shortly before noon — was intended as a provocation, an official at South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said on condition of anonymity, citing official policy. No one was hurt, and the North Koreans retreated.
“It’s not clear whether it was intentional or whether it was to catch fish,” he said, adding that four North Koreans were unarmed and the fifth carried a rifle.
They advanced about 30m past the Military Demarcation Line separating the two armies before retreating after South Korean forces fired about 40 warning shots, the official said.
And then there’s the evolving crisis over what Eric S Margolis, a contributing foreign editor of the Toronto Sun, calls “nuclear blackmail” in a column that reads in part:
NORTH Korea’s announcement this week it would shortly conduct an underground nuclear test provoked a 10-megaton explosion of international anger and threats against the isolated Stalinist regime.
A senior US State Department official warned, “we are not going to accept a nuclear North Korea.” But that, of course, is just what Washington has been doing ever since CIA disclosed in 2003 that North Korea had up to five operational nuclear weapons, and more in development.
That also was the same year President George Bush launched an invasion of Iraq, ostensibly to protect America from nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction that it, in fact, not possess. Three hundred sixty billion dollars later, this unnecessary war in Iraq goes on.
North Korea has repeatedly stated it is developing uranium and plutonium-based nuclear weapons, and medium and intercontinental-range missiles to carry them.
In 2005, CIA’s then director, George Tenet, confirmed North Korea’s Taepo-dong ICBM was theoretically able to deliver a nuclear warhead to North America. North Korea’s eccentric ‘Dear Leader,’ Kim Jong-il, has made an art of using nuclear blackmail to squeeze money out of South Korea, Japan and the West.
Nuclear threats are North Korea’s only remaining exports. A US-led coalition has shut down its exports of missiles to the Mideast, counterfeiting US currency, and black market amphetamine sales to Japan. So, what is the tough-talking Bush Administration going to do about North Korea? Probably not much.
Here’s a Reuters “Nuclear Time Line” on Korea.
Japan has made it clear it doesn’t want the world to just sit back and watch North Korean test a nuclear warhead:
Japan said today it will push for a punitive UN resolution if North Korea conducts a nuclear test despite a Security Council warning, amid reports that Tokyo plans to step up its own economic sanctions against the reclusive communist regime.
North Korea’s threat to conduct its first nuclear weapon test has prompted grave international concern, and its neighbours applauded the Security Council statement urging the North to cancel the test, which could come as early as tomorrow. The statement warned of unspecified consequences if North Korea proceeds with the test, and urged it to return immediately to talks on scrapping its nuclear weapons programme.
Foreign Minister Taro Aso welcomed the statement, saying Japan sees a possible nuclear test by North Korea as “a grave threat to the peace and security of not only Japan but also of north-east Asia and the international community�.
“If North Korea conducts a nuclear weapons test despite the concerns expressed by international society, the Security Council must adopt a resolution outlining severely punitive measures,� Aso said in a statement released after the council meeting.
If that happens, the Japanese government plans to step up trade restrictions and freeze additional North Korea-linked bank accounts, the Nihon Keizai business newspaper reported.
Will sanctions work? Would North Korea care? Is this all part of an elaborate political ballet so that North Korea can extract the best bargaining position from the international community. Or, as in the case of Iran, is the biggest danger that the international community pooh-pooh’s North Korea’s bellicose statements until it’s too late?
MORE READING ON THIS SUBJECT:
—Ed Morrissey on DMZ tensions escalating.
—The English Guy
—The Philippines also tells North Korea not to do the test.
—North Korea nuclear test worries everyone.
—The UN considers sending a sanction letter to North Korea
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.