North Korea’s Nuclear Threats, in Focus

North Korea has been issuing near-daily threats against the United States and South Korea, and sometimes at United States forces in the Pacific. In one of the boldest warnings, the North said it could carry out pre-emptive nuclear strikes against the United States. Many analysts are extremely doubtful that the North could hit the United States mainland with a missile, whether nuclear-tipped or not. Some of its missiles could, however, hit South Korea or Japan and American forces there, analysts said.

With each threat, there is always some mention that such attacks would be carried out if North Korea were attacked or otherwise provoked.

Because the United States led the successful push for sanctions at the United Nations to punish North Korea for its nuclear test in February, its third. The North also often ratchets up its political speech during joint United States-South Korea military exercises, which it portrays as a threat. One of those exercises is continuing.

In the past, United States administrations and South Korean governments managed to tamp down periodic heightened tensions with North Korea by offering concessions, including much-needed aid, in return for the North's promising to end its nuclear weapons programs. Pyongyang has reneged on those promises after receiving aid. Many analysts believe that North Korea is again seeking aid and other concessions, while some suggest that it merely wants to be recognized as a nuclear state, like Pakistan. Still others suggest that the North genuinely fears an attack by the United States or South Korea and views the warnings as deterrence. Highlighting a perceived threat from abroad is also a favorite tool the North Korean government uses to ensure internal cohesion in an impoverished country that has experienced enormous privation, including devastating famine and continuing pervasive hunger.

North Korea has conducted three nuclear tests since 2006. It is widely believed to be capable of at least making crude nuclear devices. North Korea has a sizable arsenal of short- and medium-range missiles, and is developing longer-range missiles. A recent assessment by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded with “moderate confidence” that the North now knows how to make a nuclear device small enough to be delivered by a ballistic missile.

If a missile attack went into the water, even if it passed over Japan, the two countries could ignore it. But if it headed for land, the United States would probably use its missile interception technology, including on Aegis-equipped ships off the Korean coast. If there were to be a more direct attack, like the torpedo that sank a South Korean warship, the Cheonan, three years ago, it is likely that both the United States and South Korea would respond. China would be unlikely to take action.

North Korea conducted underground nuclear tests in 2006, in 2009 and in February. The most recent was the largest, though it was estimated to be less powerful than the first bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.

North Korea’s third nuclear test came two months after the country launched a rocket that put its first satellite into orbit. The United States and its allies said that the rocket launching was a cover for North Korea to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles that could reach North America. The United Nations Security Council condemned the launching as a violation of resolutions that barred the North from testing technology used for ballistic missiles, and adopted tightened sanctions against the country.

As the North’s missile technology has become more sophisticated, the launching of longer-range missiles has evoked more international concern. In 1998, when the North launched a Taepodong that flew over Japan, Japan temporarily cut off its contribution toward a North Korean energy project. But in July 2006, when the North launched another long-range missile, various countries began imposing sanctions, while the United Nations Security Council began adding to economic sanctions. In April 2009, when the North’s efforts to launch a three-stage Unha-2 rocket failed, the Security Council said it would strengthen punitive measures. It did so after the North conducted a nuclear test the next month. In April 2012, the United States canceled planned food aid when the North tried to launch a more advanced missile, the Unha-3. That launching failed, but another in December succeeded in lifting a small satellite into orbit. The Security Council tightened sanctions yet again. After the North’s nuclear test in February, China, the North’s longtime protector, participated in writing painful new sanctions aimed at North Korean banking, trade and travel.

The Obama administration adopted a policy of “strategic patience” in 2009, under which direct negotiations or offers of aid to Pyongyang are withheld unless the North Korea leadership shows “positive, constructive behavior” and willingness to negotiate over the dismantling of its nuclear weapons program.

The policy is a response to the American belief that the United States had unwisely offered aid, often in the wake of Pyongyang’s provocations, or struck agreements with the North on which the North later reneged. Strategic patience, in the words of Robert M. Gates, the former defense secretary, grew out of a desire not “to buy the same horse twice.”

Critics say that while the policy has allowed the United States to weather multiple rounds of belligerence by Kim Jong-il and his son, Kim Jong-un, without making concessions, it has done little to curb the development of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

The United Nations Security Council has passed four resolutions since 2006 aimed at penalizing North Korea for its nuclear weapons program. In addition, the United States, which remains in a technical state of war with North Korea, has imposed its own regimen of strict economic sanctions. The combined effects have severely squeezed but not crippled North Korea’s economy.

Under Resolutions 1718 (2006), 1874 (2009), 2087 (2013) and 2094 (2013), the United Nations has prohibited the North from conducting nuclear tests or launching ballistic missiles, requested that it abandon all future efforts to pursue nuclear weapons and urged it to return to negotiations with China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States, the so-called six-party talks. The resolutions have also imposed embargoes on large-scale arms, weapons-related research and development materials, and luxury goods; banned many types of financial transactions including transfers of cash; placed new restrictions on diplomats; and created monitoring mechanisms for enforcement.

The American sanctions freeze all North Korean property interests in the United States, ban most imports of goods and services from the North, and prohibit American dealings with any names on a blacklist of North Korean businesses and individuals suspected of illicit activities including money laundering, counterfeiting, currency smuggling and narcotics trafficking.

Nothing in the American sanctions prohibits American travel to North Korea or the export of food and other types of humanitarian aid, although there are some restrictions.
The sanctions leave room for considerable trade in many types of goods and services. China, which supplies much of North Korea’s basic needs, is not in any violation of the United Nations resolutions.

In January 2013, Navi Pillay, the chief human rights official at the United Nations, expressed concern that international preoccupation with North Korea’s missile and nuclear weapons programs had diverted attention from human rights abuses that have “no parallel anywhere in the world.” North Korea, Ms. Pillay said, operates an “elaborate network of political prison camps” that hold more than 200,000 prisoners, according to human rights organizations. The camps not only punish people for peaceful activities, but also employ “torture and other forms of cruel and inhumane treatment, summary executions, rape, slave labor and forms of collective punishment that may amount to crimes against humanity.”


Even outside the camps, North Koreans endure “extreme forms of repression and human rights violations,” according to Amnesty International. They may be subject to arbitrary arrest, and lack recourse to legal rights and protections, an independent news media or independent civic organizations. There are no known opposition political parties, and those who criticize the government are severely punished. Government policies have contributed to food shortages and famine. Food insecurity and chronic malnutrition remain widespread, and millions are still dependent on food aid, according to the United Nations. In March, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that more than a fourth of all North Korean children are stunted from chronic malnutrition, and that two-thirds of the country’s 24 million people struggle to find food from day to day.

The current president, Park Geun-hye, who was sworn in at the end of February, has taken a strong stand against the North in recent weeks, parrying its threats with warnings of her own. She has told her top generals to respond immediately to any provocative acts.

“I consider the current North Korean threats very serious,” Ms. Park told the South’s generals on April 1. “If the North attempts any provocation against our people and country, you must respond strongly at the first contact with them without any political consideration.”

And her government has said that if the North followed through on its threats to mount a nuclear attack, its government would be “erased from the earth.”

At the same time, she believes in building trust with the North, and has continued to offer it aid.

Ms. Park’s father, who ran the country as a dictator during the cold war, also held a firm line on North Korea, but the South began taking a much more conciliatory stance in the 1990s.

From 1998 to 2008, they pursued a “sunshine policy” of reconciliation and economic cooperation that sent billions of dollars in business investments, goods and humanitarian aid to the North. Ms. Park’s immediate predecessor, Lee Myung-bak, said the North would need to give up its nuclear weapons to receive any more aid. But he was criticized for what many saw as a weak response after the North shelled a South Korean island in 2010, killing four people.

On April 11, Ms. Park’s government softened its tone on the North, issuing a call for dialogue to resolve the tensions.

China, the North's patron, has long feared that a collapse of the North Korean government could lead to a unified Korea allied with the United States. China helped write and did vote for the most recent round of United Nations sanctions, but has been loath to push the North too hard.

After the United States and the Soviet Union divided the Korean Peninsula at the end of the World War II in 1945, they helped install rival governments in Seoul and Pyongyang. Each asserted claims to the whole of Korea. The two fought the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended not in a peace treaty but a truce. Mutual mistrust runs deep, although there have been intermittent attempts at political reconciliation and economic cooperation.

In November 2010, North Korea carried out an artillery attack on a South Korean border island that killed two Marines and two civilians. South Korea countered with an artillery barrage on the North Korean gun positions. The number of North Korean casualties is still unknown.

The six-party talks started in 2003 after earlier bilateral negotiations between the United States and North Korea failed to stop the North's nuclear weapons program, and North Korea announced its withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The aim of the talks was to persuade North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons facilities. The six nations signed an agreement in 2005 in which North Korea agreed in principle to dismantle all its nuclear weapons facilities in return for economic aid and security guarantees. In 2007, they reached a follow-up deal.

Despite such strides, the talks were marred by differences over how to implement those agreements and by deep-seated mistrust between Washington and Pyongyang. There was progress: the North blew up a cooling tower for a five-megawatt nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, whose spent fuel could be reprocessed into plutonium, and the North was removed from State Department list of state sponsors of terrorism in 2008.

But the talks collapsed the next year because of differences over the nuclear inspections. A critical stumbling block was the North's refusal to come clean on American suspicions that it was running a clandestine uranium enrichment program for alternative nuclear fuel. In 2010, North Korea unveiled a uranium enrichment plant.

North Korea’s latest bellicose behavior has rattled nerves more than previous episodes because of the youth and inexperience of the North’s new leader, Kim Jong-un. While South Korea and the United States have said the provocation appears to be following a familiar script – one that will stop short of a wider war – Mr. Kim’s motives are largely a mystery.

For that reason, the United States has mounted an unusually muscular display of deterrence, sending a guided-missile destroyer and B-2 stealth bombers to the Korean Peninsula – all to send a message that it will defend the United States and its allies in the region. South Korea’s new president, Park Geun-hye, has also pledged a robust response to any attack.

China, which has long frustrated the West with its unwillingness to curb the North, may be growing impatient with Mr. Kim. President Xi Jinping said recently, “No one should be allowed to throw a region and even the whole world into chaos for selfish gains.”

It took a long time, a lot of work — and repeated decisions by several American presidents, of both parties, to kick the North Korea problem down the road because the risks of confronting the North were too high. The project started under Kim Il-sung, the country's founder and the grandfather of the current leader, Kim Jong-un. Kim Il-sung knew that Gen. Douglas MacArthur wanted Washington to allow the use of nuclear weapons against Chinese and North Korean troops during the Korean War. By the 1980s, American intelligence satellites were watching the nuclear complex at Yongbyon come together. Relations between the United States and the North grew especially tense over the issue in 1994, and some in the White House feared a war could break out. A pact was eventually hammered out that year, the Agreed Framework, but it fell apart in 2002, during the George W. Bush administration, partly over allegations the North was cheating on its agreements and developing another path to a bomb.

In 2006, the North conducted its first nuclear test, a partial fizzle. But the subsequent tests, including one this year, were more successful. Now the country has an estimated 6 to 10 weapons, or the fuel for them, and a pathway to many more.

The North committed to doing so eventually in 1992, and again under an agreement in 2005. But many now doubt the North has any incentive to give up its weapons. After all, the country saw Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi give up Libya's nuclear weapons development project -- only to be ousted from power, with American help. After its third nuclear test in February, North Korea declared that it would never join talks on giving up its nuclear weapons until the entire world became weapons-free.

So far, they have largely dismissed the warning as a bluster aimed at increasing a sense of crisis in what appears to be an attempt to force the United States and South Korea to engage. The State Department has not issued any warnings of imminent danger for its citizens in the region. The North is also seen as trying to rattle the South's economy, and its government, by scaring away foreign investors.

The isolated North is profoundly impoverished. With little access to hard currency, it embraced the creation of the Kaesong industrial project as a good source of money. The South believed that the economic cooperation would gradually chip away at political mistrust and pave the way for eventual reunification of the divided peninsula. The factory park paired cheap North Korean labor with South Korean manufacturing savvy. The North has now blocked access to the South, robbing North Korean workers of wages paid by the South, but has not announced an absolute closure.

The demilitarized zone, or DMZ, is a buffer zone that has divided North and South Korea since a 1953 armistice agreement ended the Korean War. Defended on both sides with minefields, barbed-wire fences and armed soldiers, the 148-mile truce line extends across the Korean Peninsula, near the 38th Parallel. This contentious land border, which is about 2.5 miles wide, is off limits to large troop concentrations and to heavy weaponry like tanks and artillery. The North and South Korean troops that patrol the mostly mountainous no man’s land are permitted to carry only pistols and rifles. Military outposts, some of which double as tourist attractions, are spread throughout the area.

The DMZ is a time-honored stop for American presidents, including President Obama, who greeted some of the 28,500 American troops stationed in South Korea during his visit there in March 2012. An unintended consequence of the off-limits nature of this zone: parts of the DMZ have turned into a wildlife sanctuary, with rare cranes and even endangered leopards finding refuge.