WiccanLiberal
02-10-2013, 12:33 PM
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/world-report/2013/02/08/why-north-korea-is-testing-nuclear-weapons-now?google_editors_picks=true
"The North's upcoming test and threats to bomb the United States are a crude attempt to intimidate the South Korean, Japanese, U.S., and Chinese governments into making economic concessions to resuscitate their sclerotic economy or provide food aid. All four governments have at varying times provided assistance to the North, three of them in exchange for ending the weapons programs. Pyongyang took the aid and continued to build their arsenals. By connecting aid to the weapons programs we have trained the North to continue building missile and nuclear bombs, since it is the one way the North can capture their neighbor's attention and get help. North Korea has resolutely avoided any major economic reforms to build a market economy, because the leadership believes reform poses too many risks to the continuity of the Kim dynasty. So they let their population starve, while they use their scarce revenues to build weapons of mass destruction to threaten their neighbors. The one bottom line the North Korean ought to consider when they make their threats: One or two nuclear weapons does not pose any real threat to the United States or its allies, because should they attempt to use them, the United States will turn North Korea, as former Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice so famously put it, into "a parking lot." Threats must be creditable and the North Korean threats simply aren't. The bigger issue has always been the North Koreans selling their technology to a nonstate actor (read: terrorist groups) against which the deterrence principle is less effective. In any case it's time the United States tell Pyongyang that we aren't playing their games any longer—the game is over and it time for them to accept the risk implicit in any political and economic reform strategy and end their contemptible threats."
The author's conclusion makes a lot of sense. I am not sure how much we can hope for with Kim in charge. The best hope for peace in the region is for Kim and his cronies to be ousted. Not terribly likely unfortunately.
"The North's upcoming test and threats to bomb the United States are a crude attempt to intimidate the South Korean, Japanese, U.S., and Chinese governments into making economic concessions to resuscitate their sclerotic economy or provide food aid. All four governments have at varying times provided assistance to the North, three of them in exchange for ending the weapons programs. Pyongyang took the aid and continued to build their arsenals. By connecting aid to the weapons programs we have trained the North to continue building missile and nuclear bombs, since it is the one way the North can capture their neighbor's attention and get help. North Korea has resolutely avoided any major economic reforms to build a market economy, because the leadership believes reform poses too many risks to the continuity of the Kim dynasty. So they let their population starve, while they use their scarce revenues to build weapons of mass destruction to threaten their neighbors. The one bottom line the North Korean ought to consider when they make their threats: One or two nuclear weapons does not pose any real threat to the United States or its allies, because should they attempt to use them, the United States will turn North Korea, as former Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice so famously put it, into "a parking lot." Threats must be creditable and the North Korean threats simply aren't. The bigger issue has always been the North Koreans selling their technology to a nonstate actor (read: terrorist groups) against which the deterrence principle is less effective. In any case it's time the United States tell Pyongyang that we aren't playing their games any longer—the game is over and it time for them to accept the risk implicit in any political and economic reform strategy and end their contemptible threats."
The author's conclusion makes a lot of sense. I am not sure how much we can hope for with Kim in charge. The best hope for peace in the region is for Kim and his cronies to be ousted. Not terribly likely unfortunately.