Experts say that North Korea has successfully tested missiles within the past year, raising the alarm.
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China announced the measure a few months after the United Nations Security Council adopted a new sanctions resolution that would target North Korea’s nuclear weapons program by tightening restrictions on coal exports. This set alarm bells ringing. But when it comes to THAAD, the unpredictable Mr Trump can deliver a reasonable message: the problem is not missile defence, but the belligerence of North Korea which makes it necessary, and which Mr Xi has done too little to restrain.
The North’s strong words come as a response to what Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said during his recent trip to Asia.
“If you look at Tillerson’s full statements, they were much more of a continuation of current policy than has been portrayed in the press, with an emphasis on expanding sanctions”, said David Wright, co-director and senior scientist of the Global Security Program for the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The South Korean military has said several times since the September test that Pyongyang was ready to conduct another nuclear blast at any time, and that a tunnel was available at the site to do so.
North Korea does not have particularly sophisticated weapons systems, and as the test Wednesday demonstrated, many are unreliable.
But just because a pre-emptive military strike is on the table, that does not mean the United States will go that route.
On Thursday, Fox News reported USA officials saying that the North is in the final stages of preparations for a sixth nuclear test, which could be conducted within days. South Korea is also the number one source of foreign tourists to China.
“North Korea has been acting behind the scenes to accelerate the Iranian ballistic missile program and perhaps many other parts of Iran’s military industrial base”, Gold explained in a video published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs – the think tank he heads.
At the same time, Tillerson seemed to rule out resuming negotiations with the North even if the North agreed that the goal of the talks would be denuclearization.
North Korea may have dug new tunnels around the Punggye-ri test site in the northeast of the country, Fox said, citing a United States official. The world’s worst-kept secret is that North Korea – a nation with a stagnant economy and a willful inability to feed its own people – is working toward developing intercontinental ballistic missiles with miniaturized nuclear warheads. While it is essential that borders are secured, terrorism is tackled and hatred confronted, we can not ignore the greatest contemporary threat of all, nuclear attacks. Threatening such an attack is unlikely to cause Pyongyang to abandon its efforts but rather have the opposite effect.
Convincing Pyongyang will be hard.
North Korea’s leaders have taken this lesson to heart.
A freeze, as proposed by China, may be the best available solution.
The North Korean regime’s belligerent response to mounting U.S. threats is reactionary and plays directly into the hands of the Trump administration.
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As Churchill told the White House in 1954, “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war”.
