The Enigma Yawns

"He's struggling to gain complete control over the military and to win their loyalty. That's why he's doing so many visits to military bases, to firm up support. He's also using the nuclear program as a bargaining chip for aid, to keep the public behind him. North Korea is not a state, it's a cult. North Korea is using its nuclear program to keep people in line and to push South Korea and the United States for concessions."
Kim Hyun-hee, former North Korean spy

 

That much intelligence experts on the international scene appear to agree with. But how to separate threats with the gruesome potential of their being carried out is another concern altogether. Although there is a decided pattern to the events unfolding, with previous occasions when incendiary aggression was voiced, and actual physical attacks embarked upon, North Korea has never been met with equal force to deter it from further attacks.

And that owes mostly to the fact that its reaction cannot be reasonably assessed until it reacts. Actions beyond the diplomatic route of international censure and United Nations' Security Council sanctions have never been attempted. Pyongyang is viewed like one of nature's unpredictably savage beasts, a viper or a wolverine, slavering beasts whose only purpose appears to be their own survival in whose purpose they ferociously destroy the lives of others.

North Korea has the world on edge, threatening to begin a "merciless sacred retaliatory war", unless the world and specifically its enemies withdraw from their provocative acts, harming North Korea. Kim Jong-un has tender sensibilities and they are not to be toyed with. He will defend his country and his reputation and their right to construct instruments of mass slaughter as their divine right ordained by the might and the power of their exceptional status.

"According to intelligence analysis of North Korea's missile movements, it is believed to have completed preparations for a launch", presumably of a more advanced, far-reaching missile that can threaten the safety and stability of those in its opinion who irritate Pyongyang beyond measure, according to an unnamed South Korean military official. And if any entity has intimate knowledge of North Korea, it is surely the South.

North Korea's fascinating horror quotient is the many and varied surprises it launches to confront an unprepared world by the level of its paranoid determination, and its progress in scientific technology that other, international experts hardly anticipated it would be able to master, but has. And what those outgoing missiles, geared to reach further and further, will be tipped with is anyone's guess.

April 10th, Wednesday, this very day, was the cut-off after which Pyongyang could no longer guarantee the safety of foreign embassy staff situated within North Korea, nor the safety of the million and a half foreigners living in South Korea, so all were urged to withdraw themselves from the region for their own safety. None took the advice, although many must surely have experienced emotions of anxiety approaching deep-seated fear.

And the day has passed, without nothing remotely untoward occurring to reflect the magnitude of the threats. But that's just the thing of it, the inflammatory rhetoric in and of itself is a form of terrorism. The bellicose warnings have resulted in South Korea, Japan and the United States being forced to take extraordinary steps to defend themselves by putting in place warships and missile interceptors, destroyers with missile-defence systems.

These alarmingly desperate reactions as a response to Pyongyang's exercise in unadorned free speech have been costly in terms of human relations, expectations and physical results. In fact, the exhortation to "all foreign institutions and enterprises and foreigners, including tourists" to "take measures for shelter and evacuation", have not impacted on the entities named, but have been stringently reacted to by the governments concerned.

And, the indelible fact of the matter remains, as UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, himself a former foreign minister of South Korea has declared: "A small incident caused by miscalculation or misjudgement may create an uncontrollable situation."

Can anyone say with any measure of accuracy that the stalemate and tension currently gripping the international community is a controlled situation?