A Republican lawmaker on the House Intelligence Committee is among those who believe North Korea will soon conduct another nuclear test, which could lead to an international crisis regardless of whether it succeeds or fails.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson devoted his first Asia trip to rallying support for “a new range of diplomatic, security and economic measures.” That included a visit to China, which is angry about the deployment of a U.S. missile defense system to South Korea.
Ambassador Joseph Yun, the State Department’s Special Representative for North Korea Policy, is following up immediately on Tillerson’s trip with a swing through China and South Korea from Friday through Thursday.
But international observers say North Korea is expanding a nuclear test site to allow for detonations that dwarf previous tests. And that could mean disaster regardless of how it turns out.
A success carries obvious risks, and those watching from Congress agree that closer attention needs to be paid to the rogue regime.
“[Kim Jong-un] might get lucky one of these days and actually hit Japan or actually do something that we’re like, now we need to focus on this solely, but he’s always … a prime focus, I think, for our national security,” House Intelligence Committee member Tom Rooney, R-Fla., told the Washington Examiner.
A North Korean defector believes the test will fail, but he said that will cause an environmental catastrophe that will cause the regime to lose control of the country, creating a different set of problems.
“A nuclear test which the North is trying to conduct at the Punggye-ri test site will break the country into two pieces,” Thae Yong-ho, a former North Korean diplomat, told Voice of America in an interview carried by South Korean media. “If a massive explosion pollutes the area, and subsequently Pyongyang loses its control over the border areas of North Hamkyong Province, a massive defection will take place there.”
Rooney was careful not to confirm the details of Thae’s assessment, but he did predict that North Korea would try to “ratchet up” their next test — and the test will “probably” take place “by this summer,” he added.
“Yeah, it’d be an environmental disaster,” Rooney said. “I don’t know what the geopolitical ramifications — whether they’re anticipating that that country could break in two and there’d be mass migration and stuff like that, I mean, who knows?”
But the U.S. government’s refusal to give the North Koreans any more foreign aid means that Kim Jong-un is likely to act with increasing aggression.
“When he doesn’t get what he wants, he does stuff like this so that country’s like the United States say ‘what is it going to take to get you to stop misbehaving?’ and then we pay him off,” Rooney said. “We’ve done it forever. And so when somebody actually — and I credit President Obama and President Trump so far — ignores the guy, he can’t believe he’s being ignored.”
