'Particularly disturbing scenario' raised by North Korea nuclear threat

Latest war of words on Korean peninsula begins as South and US begin military exercise

Marines from South Korea, front, and the US, top, before a joint military drill in the port of Pohang (AFP/Getty)

The threat of a “pre-emptive and offensive nuclear strike” by North Korea has sharply escalated tensions on the Korean peninsula while thousands of US and South Korea troops started annual military exercises, the biggest in recent history.

Although North Korea has often threatened South Korea, the latest rhetorical onslaught “has laid out a particularly disturbing scenario,” warned Evans Revere, former senior diplomat in Seoul. “The North’s threats are now backed up by a growing nuclear and missile capability,” he told The Independent. “They have to be taken seriously, even if the North Koreans are merely engaging in a new form of chest thumping.”


 Marines from South Korea, front, and the US, top, before a joint military drill in the port of Pohang 
 (AFP/Getty)

North Korea’s party newspaper Rodong Sinmun greeted the arrival of 17,000 US marines, soldiers, sailors and airmen by declaring “our targets are the US bases in South Korea and the rest of the Asia-Pacific region as well as the US mainland”.

South Korea said the exercises would be the largest ever following North Korea’s fourth nuclear test in January and a long-range rocket launch last month that triggered a UN Security Council resolution and tough new sanctions. Isolated North Korea has rejected criticism of its nuclear and rocket programmes, even from old ally China, and last week leader Kim Jong-un ordered his country to be ready to use nuclear weapons in the face of what he sees as growing threats from enemies.

Beijing said it was “deeply concerned” about the war games. The Russian foreign ministry, meanwhile, said it was opposed to the war games, but added that the threats of a nuclear retaliation were “absolutely impermissible”.

The joint US and South Korean military command said it had notified North Korea of “the non-provocative nature of this training” involving about 17,000 American troops and more than 300,000 South Koreans. The North’s ability to carry out nuclear strikes is in doubt, despite Pyongyang’s fourth underground nuclear test in early January and the launch of a rocket that put a satellite into orbit last month. Nonetheless, no one was willing to discount entirely the regime’s claim, that it possessed “state-of-the-art weapons that no country in the world has previously possessed and can bombard the US in any way we want”.

As Mr Revere said: “US defence planners now have to consider the possibility that North Korea might actually try to carry out its threats.” Washington, he said, would not want to be caught “flat-footed” if the North Koreans attempt to do what they have said they will do. Nor, he added, would the US “stand idly by while its forces, its bases, its allies, or its homeland were attacked”.


 An anti-war activist at a rally against the exercises near the US embassy in Seoul 
 (AFP/Getty)

The US and South Korea are now conducting one of their largest exercises in recent years. The nuclear carrier USS John C Stennis will be cruising off the east coast of the peninsula accompanied by a flotilla of destroyers while navy, marine and air force planes are involved.

“If the North provokes us during this exercise, the US and our troops will retaliate with an attack tenfold stronger,” said one South Korean officer.

“Things are getting dangerous on the Korean Peninsula,” Mr Revere warned. “One can only hope,” he said, that an adviser to Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un would “have the courage” to warn him of the possible consequences.

“By pursuing nuclear and missile adventurism and by being the only world leader to threaten the use of nuclear weapons,” said Mr Revere, “he is undermining the very security he claims to be defending.”