[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.]
By Choe Sang-Hun and David E. Sanger
 |
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.