Perspective is (almost) Everything

"[U.S. student Otto Warmbler was provided with excellent care by North Korea which spent] all the money for nursing [him]."
"The U.S. administration, or some people with a certain intention, let him die. This must be intended to foster and spread anti-Communist hatred within America."
"The situation on the Korean Peninsula is on the eve of the breakout of nuclear war."
"We can survive [such a war]."
"[ U.S. President Donald J. Trump is] a crazy man, a thug, a pathetic man with a big mouth."
Choe Kang-il, senior official, North Korean Foreign Ministry

"There will never be a time that we are not the most powerful nation in the world!"  BBC News

It seems that Mr. Choe got that one right. Unsurprisingly, he was also describing North Korea's dear little chubby leader to a T. But then he is also advocating in his professions of being able to distinguish acceptable behaviours as opposed to those that are clearly aimed at slurring North Korea's leader as a juvenile enfant terrible best left locked behind bars in recognition of his bellicose threats to turn the world into a fiery cauldron, the perverse direction given to the people of North Korea to regard the United States' ambition to incinerate them post-haste.

The other leader, the crazy man, the thug, the big mouth did, after all say something quite approximating that as a testy rejoinder on Twitter, the official communications organ of the White House. So the expectation is there, a nuclear war in the offing, North Korea matched against the United States. Patriotism is in evidence everywhere with high school students marching in military uniform daily denouncing criminal America in the streets of Pyongyang.

Where billboards and posters on public roads feature missiles sending the U.S. Capital into smithereens, the American flag shredded beyond repair. Even kindergarten playgrounds are not off limits for posters of deadly missiles. State television is fixed on those images. But are North Koreans fearful of any outcome between the two nuclear-possessing adversaries? Not really, since North Koreans have it on the most reliably reassuring advice that it is not America that will win that war.

"If we have to go to war, we won't hesitate to totally destroy the United States", Mun Hyok-myong, 38, and a teacher, stated with confidence. More or less quoting Donald J. Trump in reverse. And since that Trump statement of reckless idiocy there has been an appreciable rise to prominence within North Korea of hard liners, responding to the American president's promise to "totally destroy" their country. Whoops, hard liners in North Korea and the same in America, however polarized their vision happens to be.

While Secretary of State Rex Tillerson engages in a futile effort at diplomacy, his president casually tweaks his nose on Twitter. Trump, it would appear, is confident that his bullying will influence Kim Jong-un to surrender his schoolyard taunts to the greater bully; except that Kim appears to feel he has the upper hand, and in any event, has no intention whatever of giving up his toys; they're his, he wants more and what Kim wants Kim gets.

Mr. Choe iterates what is already generally assumed to be fact, that North Korea took its lesson from Iraq and Libya both of which surrendered their aspirational nuclear programs only to have the United States move in on them removing their regimes, which North Korea takes as its signal that it would be extremely foolhardy to make themselves vulnerable in the same manner. North Koreans cling to the notion of their infallible dear little leader leading them to the apex of world power.

After all, in every obscure, isolated village, in every home there are Big Brother speakers broadcasting morning propaganda doses. The totalitarian state issues its own version of the history of the world and North Korea's rightful place in the order of world influencers and power-mongers. All adults sport facial pins of the Great Leader or the Dear Leader, Kim's grandfather and father, whose portraits appear everywhere in homes, factories, classrooms, public arenas. The most adored portrait, however, is reserved for reverence of Kim himself, the tiny perfect monster.

Of the United States and its people, North Koreans believe that "just as a wolf cannot become a lamb, so an American imperialist can never change his aggressive nature", a bit of a spin on a leopard never changing its spots type of thing. The corollary to which is that a Kim is a Kim is a Kim.

So, given the principles and the principals involved here, let's just hope there are no accidental aerial collisions between an American and a North Korean warplane. And that the U.S. can resist the temptation to bomb a ballistic missile site whose missile, they intuit preventively is in preparation for launch over Tokyo with a nuclear warhead.

And Do Exactly What, Now?

KN-15 missile transporter.  AFP PHOTO / KCNA VIA KNS

"[North Korea] is caught in a time warp which [originated] in the armistice of 1953, designed to put a temporary halt to a war that claimed up to 3 million lives. Sixty years later ... we now find ourselves on the edge of a nuclear winter."
"...Miscalculation, rather than design, is capable of triggering a "Sarajevo" moment, and with more than a million troops under arms and some 8,000 artillery pieces located within range of half the South's [South Korea] population, this is not a moment for sending the wrong signals."
Lord David Alton, North Korea expert, Great Britain

"It is not unreasonable to assume that mass grave sites in existence today will still be there years from now."
"As we have seen in many other post-conflict settings around the world, people will want to know what happened to family members, and an accurate historical record will need to be created as part of the process of recovery, particularly on a scale such as that in North Korea."
Sarah A. Son, Transitional Justice Working Group, Seoul, South Korea

What military experts say appears to be a North Korean KN-08 Intercontinental Ballistic Missile under development by North Korea  Credit:  Wong Maye-E/AP

North Korean defectors have brought evidence to the outside world of widespread human rights violations occurring in their country of birth of a shocking dimension. United Nations investigators determined that extrajudicial executions of political prisoners take place routinely. A United Nations commission of enquiry validated the existence of prison camps, of systematic torture, of summary executions and other state-sponsored atrocities committed against any who dare protest against their government and leader.

"They hanged people in crowded places like markets and left the bodies there for hours to instill fear among the people", stated Oh Se Hyek, a North Korean defector from Hamgyong-budko, a northeastern province of North Korea on the border with China which represents the area in the North that has expressed a majority of the estimated 30,000 North Korean defectors living as refugees in South Korea. The Security Council of the UN had been urged to refer North Korea's leadership to the International Criminal Court for prosecution of crimes against humanity.

All of which is moot. The oppression of the North Koreans by their Dear Leader Kim Jong Un, their imprisonment, torture and deaths for which the international community hopes to be able to prosecute him, may, if ill fortune has its way, be but a relatively slight figure in contrast to what could eventuate if Kim continues his provocative and dangerously volatile challenges to the West. A mis-step, an ill-judged or poorly-thought-out response to an ultimate provocation could spell a regional, even global conflagration.

North Korea is isolated, but in league with other outlier countries like Syria and Iran. Kim has been pleased to flout nuclear treaties, to sell weapons to terrorists (no constraints there, since it is in essence, a terrorist state), to helpfully aid Syria's Bashar al Assad in his chemical weapons attacks on his civilian population, and delights in enraging the West through not only testing nuclear weapons as his scientists succeed in improving their formulae with the aim of miniaturizing and producing more powerful bombs, and the long-range ballistic missiles to carry them over the Pacific, but also engaging in cyberwarfare.

Kim Jong-un on board 'Submarine No 748' during a visit to the east coast North Korean Navy Unit 167 in a photo released in June 2014     Credit: EPA/Rodong Sinmun

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a deliberately isolated state denying entry to outsiders, whose people have absorbed a religious mysticism that plays right into Kim Jong Un's strategy to keep them isolated and unaware of the outside world, unable to compare the conditions they live under to those of other countries, even their neighbour, South Korea. They may be suffering hardships and privation, but their belief is that they are required to suffer in preparation for "paradise on earth". 

In a sense, submitting themselves to a divine destiny of sacrifice now for reward later, bearing some degree of resemblance to the fanatical Islamist concept of martyrdom in their preferred "cult of death", whereby jihad instructs them to kill non-believers to achieve Islamic warrior status and martyrdom to enable them to be welcomed in paradise by nubile virgins.

Should North Korea's divine leader order the combined thrust of an ICBM and nuclear warhead as he threatens, the response would be immediate. Not only would Pyongyang and its population be vulnerable to return fire, but so too would be the population of Seoul. The death toll and the overall carnage would be formidable and horribly final.

Kim Jong Un doesn't appear to be averse to slaughter and the wholesale commission of atrocities, for not even members of his extended family are immune to his barbaric disdain for human life. He ordered his uncle-by-marriage to be killed, a man who had tutored and supported him, and did the same for his half-brother in a planned assassination in a foreign setting by operatives armed with a deadly chemical.

North Korea has an immense military; one million people under arms on active duty, no funds spared for that, even while his population occasionally suffers food shortages and in some years a catastrophic famine strikes, killing countless numbers of civilian unfortunates. Now, once again, the United Nations has issued a warning that flood and drought have diminished North Korean food crops and the nation will soon be on the verge of starvation.

North Korea's crop production has been hit in recent years by both drought and flooding  Getty Images

China, North Korea's sponsor, finding the North's position as buffer between the Western allies in Asia and itself invaluable, would be distressed to see a situational change with the two Koreas reuniting under South Korea's system of democratic governance. And nor does Beijing relish the prospect of a deposed Kim leading to a mass influx of North Korean refugees flooding into China. American urging for Beijing to convince Kim to stand down from his belligerence has not succeeded. Hongxiang Industrial Development of China continues to forward aluminum oxide to the North to support its nuclear weapons agenda.

An underwater test-firing of a strategic submarine ballistic missile in an undated photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) in Pyongyang on April 24, 2016. KCNA/Reuters

The World on the Way to the Future With North Korea

"As long as Kim Jong Un is in power, North Korea will never give up its nuclear weapons, even if it's offered $1-trillion or $10 trillion in rewards."
"Some countries are interested in following North Korea’s path to become nuclear powers themselves. Therefore, North Korean diplomats retain their dignity despite the criticisms of the international community."
"It is not easy for North Koreans to understand the concepts of the ICC or human rights. But they will be greatly interested if they hear that Kim Jong Un will be tried at the international court. It will be a direct sign that Kim Jong Un is a criminal and his regime has no future."
"North Korea will collapse on its own when enough external information introduced through the internet reveals the truth of the Kim regime to the residents."
Thae Yong Ho, North Korean high-level defector

Thae Yong-ho, the former North Korean deputy ambassador to London, gestures while speaking during a news conference at the Government Complex in Seoul, South Korea, Dec. 27, 2016. Reuters

"Almost nothing can be done diplomatically to dissuade North Korea from abandoning its nuclear program. It will consistently cheat on any agreement."
"Rather than hanging on to the fantasy that Pyongyang can be cajoled into relinquishing its nuclear weapons, the United States should consider adopting a more traditional deterrent policy against North Korea. Washington should state that if Pyongyang launches a nuclear-armed ballistic missile, the United States will respond with a full U.S. attack on North Korea."
"The only sure way of ending North Korea’s nuclear threat is to change the regime in Pyongyang. Denuclearization will not happen as long as Kim and his junta are in power."
Michael Auslin, director, Japan Studies, American Enterprise Institute

The US and North Korea aimed at restarting denuclearisation talks before Kim Jong-il, right, died

A rogue dynastic regime that constantly threatens its neighbours, from South Korea to Japan to the Philippines, going so far as to target a South Korean ship resulting in multiple deaths of South Korean sailors does so because of a high degree of hubris, the assurance that a powerful neighbour in China, will protect it, and behind it all, an illogical fantasy that their stance strikes fear in the hearts of their enemies.

North Korea's success in managing to evade any international consequences for its potentially world-destabilizing actions acts as an inspiration to yet another despotic, threatening regime, the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has exchanged scientists and ICBM and nuclear programs between the two outlier nations.

In one respect they are quite right; the mass delusion that they display with impunity does strike fear in the hearts of those whom the Kim regime threatens for the very real reason that there is no reasonable mind behind the rash, impetuous, irascibility and sense of  triumph that permeates the regime, led by a megalomaniac who insists that his population view him as a semi-divine hero.

A man capable of quixotic episodes of bravado, boasting that his regime is capable of striking both near neighbours and those at a geographic distance, and which has the demonstrated capacity to do that very thing. Testing nuclear weapons, testing medium-to-long range intercontinental ballistic missiles, and sending up successfully launched satellites.

AFP -- Pyongyang used a three-stage rocket to put a satellite into space in 2012

This, by a nation that lives on a financial shoestring, whose general population lives in poverty, whose critics are imprisoned in gulags, and whose military is well equipped and well fed and numerous while the bulk of the population lives in privation, schooled from childhood to venerate their tyrant, a man capable of the most venal excesses, rewarding the faithful, deliberately unmindful of a government's responsibility to its population.

And even his retinue of faithful supporters tremble at his dangerously impulsive moods which can turn in an instant against a relative, to condemn him to a horrible, tortuous death to remove any doubts of his loyalty; serving as a warning to others. Convinced that their hermetic way of life is sacrosanct as long as that power is supported by the threat of nuclear warheads, nothing dissuades them from this path.

Korean Central News Agency/AFP/Getty Images     Trump says U.S. pressure on China will rein in Kim Jong-un, but also wants to slap punishing tariffs on Beijing while seeking its help

The outside world looking in on what they can see of North Korea bleeds tears of compassion for the suffering, starving North Koreans and deals are made to supply food, medicine and energy sources for the promises by the regime that the research that culminated in ICBS of longer thrust, and the miniaturization of nuclear heads would be discontinued.

Those agreements provide vast entertainment potential to the erratic, unpredictable regime that casually sloughs off any promises made in exchange for humanitarian aid for a delusional dictator that is comfortable with a starving populace whose underfed status leads to genetic changes in problematical health presentations, reserving its meagre treasury for its military programs.

Supremely Psychopathic

"The power of [the] explosion is believed to be twice as large as the fourth test, which makes me believe it [North Korea] finally succeeded with the miniaturization."
"[If Friday's test was the success North Korea claims, it will] soon be heading toward developing a hydrogen bomb, and if so, a device with a bitter impact."
Park Jiyoung, senior research fellow, science and technology policy program, Asan Institute for Policy Studies, Seoul 

"[The test] confirmed the structure and specific features of movement of nuclear warhead that has been standardized to be able to be mounted on strategic ballistic missiles."
"The standardization of the nuclear warhead will enable the DPRK to produce at will and as many as it wants [of] a variety of smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear warheads of higher strike power."
Korean Central News Agency

"By carrying out repeated tests, they want to show the world that their nuclear capability is growing."
"But it's hard to know how far they are able to miniaturize the bombs and make them into warheads."
Tetsuo Kotani, senior research fellow, Japan Institute of Affairs, Tokyo

The experts are cautious in their approach to analyzing what is felt to be known, what is hypothesized, and what has been witnessed at a remove, but which sensitive diagnostic equipment has categorized and human intelligence agency has synthesized and posited. There has always been a tendency to downplay the urgency and seriousness of Kim Jong-un's bellicosity in his hostile address to the global community.

There can be no mislabelling of his aspirational intentions, but because he presents as such an absurd- appearing caricature, sane and level minds tend to dismiss him as a buffoon given to hyperbole as he struts the world stage from his cloistered kingdom, even while he whips the scientific minds at his disposal as the country's supreme despot assigned by a higher ideological and mystic power to pose as a world leader of a militarized nation.

There is not a scintilla of care in this man's psyche for the common good nor the common man. Born and bred to entitlement of a dynasty believing itself to be appointed by the heavens above, Kim views himself as impervious to criticism, common sense or concern for the common weal -- his own self-perceived status is as the world leader in all matters military leading to world upheaval where he sees himself subjugating his critics through the weapons advances no one believes he can achieve, yet he does -- imbuing him with supreme confidence.

The historical fact of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the dread, well-documented consequences is sloughed off, if his mind ever lingers on the immensely destructive power he intends to unleash. If, after all, the United States, his great nemesis, saw fit to destroy tens of thousands of lives of innocent people in its combat zone of vengeance against Pearl Harbour and imperial Japan's own plan of conquest, he could go them one better. And this is the trajectory that most pleases him.

Boasting of his regime's mounting of nuclear warheads on rockets, North Korea's fifth test of nuclear power on Friday was sufficiently powerful to influence his critics, expert in the field of such weaponry to raise their eyebrows and concede the ambition of the possible. Each of the nuclear tests that have shocked the world community have a shorter interregnum between them. Progress is surprisingly swift.

The Friday nuclear explosion precipitated a tremblor with a magnitude of 5.3, more powerful and larger than the previous, fourth test in January with its 5.1 tremblor effect. South Korea's defence ministry identified the fourth explosive force at 6 kilotons and the more recent fifth, at ten. Several years ago the absurdly named Democratic People's Republic of Korea, sent a satellite into orbit. The magnitude of the cost involved in all of this is staggering.

Staggering also is the impecunious state that diverts such massive treasury sums toward achieving weapons superiority at the cost of feeding its citizenry, leading to generations of stunted growth for the mass of the population whom their glorious leader feels should be able to get by on subsistence calories for the greater glory of the nation. The toss-up between weapons or food is a no-contest decision on the part of Dear Leader. His subjects adore him in any event -- or else.

And nothing pleases Dear Leader quite so much as successes, one after another, of his plans to demonstrate the capacity and capability of North Korea's engineering prowess in fashioning powerful weapons of awful destruction; each of these successes represents a tantrum that has culminated in the reward of confounding critics and exhilarating the supreme psychopath and the cadre of minor psychopaths who do his supreme bidding.