“The United States and (South Korea) are taking actions every day to strengthen our alliance and respond to North Korea’s continued aggressive behavior”, Gen. Vincent Brooks, commander of U.S. Forces Korea, said in a statement.
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Speaking in the South Korean capital, Sung Kim, the USA envoy on North Korea, added that the United States remained open to authentic, meaningful dialogue with Pyongyang on ending its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Moreover, the sanctions prohibit exports or re-exports of goods, services and technology to North Korea and new investments by U.S. persons regardless of where they are located. Humanitarian aid is exempt from sanctions on North Korea, although the sanctions can make aid work more hard.
Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said in his memoirs that A.Q. Khan, the father of that country’s nuclear program, transferred two dozen centrifuges to the North and some technical expertise around 1999. In this context, North Korea’s nuclear breakout-and Kim Jong Un’s decision to build his legitimacy on the nuclear accomplishments of his father and grandfather-will likely be regarded as an enormous strategic misjudgment.
North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons Institute earlier justified testing nuclear missiles as retaliation “against enemies if they make provocations”, the KCNA reported.
North Korea showed its potential ability to strike the United States on August 24, when it launched a missile from a submarine off its eastern coast. Here again, analysts believe that China can be a bigger target than Pakistan and Iran. “I think that you couldn’t necessarily rule that possibility out”, says Snyder.
“While we saw this work in Iran, over time countries can adjust to sanctions”, he said.
That deal, known as “Agreed Framework”, however, unravelled with the outbreak of the second nuclear crisis in 2012 after the communist nation was found to have been running a clandestine program to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. Furthermore, experts argue that North Korea can produce a bomb with a yield of at least 10 kilotons. They further sought the resumption as soon as possible of “meaningful” Six Party Talks (SPT) to press for the Korean Peninsula’s “denuclearisation”.
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North Korea is an example of this, as are Washington’s “brazen” efforts to provoke problems in the South China Sea by claiming to be a “protector of the rules”, the newspaper added in the commentary, published under the pen name “Zhong Sheng”, meaning “Voice of China”, often used to give views on foreign policy. The problem with such a policy, he adds, is that if time is not on the USA side the policy options move to the extremes, either acquiescence or use force to achieve the objective of denuclearization and he thinks we might be headed in that direction.
