Crisis on the Korean Peninsula

Kim’s Latest Big Bang

North Korea’s fifth nuclear test produced an explosion fury and hysteria around the world, an empty threats against the Hermit Kingdom, and a giant sell-off in stock markets by foolish investors.

No wonder gleeful North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was having such a big laugh.  It’s not often that a small nation of only 24.8 million can defy the mighty United States, Japan, South Korea and even its sole ally, China. But Kim did and survived the experience.

North Korea fired off its fifth underground nuclear device estimated at 15-20 kilotons. The detonation was estimated at around the same size as the US nuclear devices that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Japan could produce a nuclear weapon in three months if it so decided. But it won’t, and so remains vulnerable to North Korea and to nuclear-armed China with which Japan is in a serious confrontation in the South China Sea and off the Ryuku Islands.

The US and South Korea have staged their annual Fall military exercises that mimic an invasion of North Korea. Each year, North Korea blows its top when this provocation occurs. There’s no military need – it’s merely primitive chest-thumping by Washington and Seoul and tantrum time for the North.  Call it North Asian Primeval Scream Therapy.

Interestingly, this time, South Korea’s conservative government led by PM Park Geun-hye joined the all-Korean threat-a-thon by vowing to turn Pyongyang ‘to ashes’ if it was seen preparing a nuclear attack on the South.  In fact, South Korea lacks this military capability in spite of recent additions of new artillery missiles. Seoul’s threats were more designed to placate angry right-wing South Korean Christian voters than to intimidate the North.

But it’s also worth recalling that in the late 1970’s, the US forced the current prime minister’s father, President Park Chung-he, to halt his secret nuclear weapons program. Today, South Korea still has good reasons to develop a few nukes, though much of North Korea is too close for retaliatory strikes.  Both sides in Korea would be better off with small, tactical nuclear weapons.

It’s always fun watching the hot-tempered Koreans hurl threats at one another and the US.  Yet one of these days, threats could turn to real shooting on the Peninsula. Think of the Japanese nuclear meltdown at Fukushima…and then multiply by 150.

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