April 10, 2013

NORTH KOREA WARNS IT IS ON BRINK OF NUCLEAR WAR WITH SOUTH

[The administration has settled on a strategy of refusing to make concessions to the North and has adopted a new plan to deter any hostilities by promising a proportionate response. In doing so, it hopes to reverse what it considers a long-term pattern in which the West offers aid to calm tensions and then North Korea breaks its promises to halt its nuclear program. But Obama administration officials acknowledge that the new strategy will work only if Mr. Kim either backs down or satisfies himself with a token show of force, like a missile test into the open ocean. The South Koreans have warned such a test could happen as early as this week.]
 Lee Jae-Won/Reuters
South Korean soldiers drilled near the demilitarized zone on Tuesday.
Seoul warned that the North may test a missile this week.
SEOUL, South Korea — As North Korea warned foreigners on Tuesday that they might want to leave South Korea because the peninsula was on the brink of nuclear war — a statement that analysts dismissed as hyperbole — the American commander in the Pacific expressed worries that the North’s young leader, Kim Jong-un, might not have left himself an easy exit to reduce tensions.
“His father and his grandfather, as far as I can see, always figured into their provocation cycle an ‘off ramp,’ ” the commander, Adm. Samuel J. Locklear III, said during testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. “And it’s not clear to me that he has thought through how to get out of it. And so that’s what makes this scenario, I think, particularly challenging.”
The administration has settled on a strategy of refusing to make concessions to the North and has adopted a new plan to deter any hostilities by promising a proportionate response. In doing so, it hopes to reverse what it considers a long-term pattern in which the West offers aid to calm tensions and then North Korea breaks its promises to halt its nuclear program. But Obama administration officials acknowledge that the new strategy will work only if Mr. Kim either backs down or satisfies himself with a token show of force, like a missile test into the open ocean. The South Koreans have warned such a test could happen as early as this week.
At the core of the concern within the administration and the intelligence agencies is that they do not understand Mr. Kim’s motivations. His father and grandfather suggested, at times, that they might be willing to negotiate to end their nuclear program. But Mr. Kim arrived in power with a small nuclear arsenal — the fuel for about six to a dozen weapons, according to intelligence officials, and a pathway to make more — and he may be calculating that with those potential weapons in hand, he is less vulnerable to attack.
“He may think he has more running room than the rest of the family did,” one administration official said this week, “and that can lead to miscalculation.”
The United States’ harder line has also been adopted by the South’s conservative new president, Park Geun-hye, who parried the North’s latest threat on Tuesday by saying she remained determined not to succumb to what she said were efforts to escalate tensions.
“How long are we going to repeat this vicious cycle where the North Koreans create tensions and we give them compromises and aid?” she said at a cabinet meeting. The North’s latest warning carried the same ominous tone as the flood of threats since the United States led a successful effort to impose sanctions on Pyongyang for conducting its third nuclear test in February.
“The situation on the Korean Peninsula is inching close to a thermonuclear war due to the evermore undisguised hostile actions of the United States and the South Korean puppet warmongers,” the Korea Asia-Pacific Peace Committee, a North Korean state agency, said in a statement. The statement added that the North “does not want to see foreigners in South Korea fall victim to the war.”
Experts saw the new threat as part of what they have begun referring to as “psychological warfare,” meant to force concessions from Washington and Seoul. In recent days, analysts say, those threats have appeared designed specifically to cause jitters among businesses and investors in South Korea, perhaps reflecting a calculation that Ms. Park might be unable to stand as firm if her country’s already weakened economy is seriously threatened.
The North’s warning followed a similar advisory last week in which it told foreign embassies in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, to devise evacuation plans. And it came a day after the North said it was temporarily suspending operations at a joint North and South Korean industrial park; the South had previously assuaged investors’ fears about possible hostilities by saying the operations at the factories were continuing despite the North’s belligerent stance.
In South Korea, where people are somewhat inured to North Korea’s bluster — or have at least learned to ignore a threat that is out of their control — there were no signs of panic on Tuesday. And the American Embassy in Seoul noted that the State Department’s travel notice about South Korea was unchanged and did not recommend any special precautions for United States citizens living in South Korea or planning to visit.
Still there were some signals of unease. Air Charter Service, a global company, said that since last week, it had received “growing interest” from corporations inquiring about evacuation contingency plans for their expatriate staff in South Korea in case the situation escalated further. Last week, General Motors said that further increases in tensions would prompt it to consider eventually moving production elsewhere. South Korea’s main stock index has dropped 65.71 points since a week ago Tuesday, although it crept up 2 points Tuesday to end the day’s trading at 1920.74.
The Korea Tourism Organization said the latest torrent of North Korean threats has so far had little effect on that industry, with the number of Chinese visitors doubling during a vacation period last week, according to Lee Kwang-soo, a spokesman for the group. Still, it was taking precautions, reaching out to foreign tourist agencies to inform them that it was safe to visit South Korea, he said.
But DMZ Tour Corporation, which specializes in taking tourists to the heavily militarized border with North Korea to experience one of the world’s last reminders of cold war tensions, said it had seen its business shrink in recent weeks.
“We have foreign tourists calling us to ask whether it’s safe to go to the border,” said Yoo Jae-sung, a company official who declined to reveal how many tourists his company had lost to the tensions. “Yesterday, a group of Australian tourists had a vote among themselves after agreeing that if any one of them was afraid to go to the border they would cancel the trip. They went.”
In another sign of heightened worries, a prominent member of South Korea’s Parliament argued Tuesday in Washington that the time had come for the South to build its own nuclear weapons.
In an interview and a speech to the Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference, the lawmaker, Chung Mong-joon, a son of the Hyundai industrial group’s founder, said South Korea should withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and “match North Korea’s nuclear progress step by step while committing to stop if North Korea stops.”
“The only thing that kept the cold war cold was the mutual deterrence afforded by nuclear weapons,” Mr. Chung said.
His position is a fairly lonely one: President Park has not endorsed any effort to turn South Korea into a nuclear power.
Choe Sang-hun reported from Seoul, and David E. Sanger from Washington. Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington.