North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is “mentally out of control,” according to South Korea’s top diplomat, who warned that their northern neighbor’s nuclear weapons program is growing at an alarming pace.
“North Korea’s nuclear capability is growing and speeding to a considerable level, considering the fifth nuclear test was the strongest in scale and the interval has quickened substantially,” South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se said on Saturday,
North Korea marked the 68th anniversary of the regime’s founding by detonating a nuclear weapon, a successful test they say establishes their ability to mount nuclear weapons “on strategic ballistic rockets.” It suggests that President Obama’s goal of restraining the program through gradual sanctions has failed, largely due to Chinese support for the North Koreans.
China has propped up the North Korean economy in the face of international sanctions and opposes the establishment of an American missile defense program in the region, fearing that the program — known as Terminal High-Altitude Aerial Defense (Thaad) — could protect against Chinese weapons as well as North Korean missiles.
“North Korea almost certainly sees this as an opportunity to take steps to enhance its nuclear and missile capabilities with little risk that China will do anything in response,” the New York Times quoted Evans J.R. Revere, a former State Department official, as saying during a speech in South Korea on Friday.
Kim Jong Un may be trying to amass the weapons required to repel a hypothetical United States-led invasion of North Korea, according to some analysts. “The deployment of a significant nuclear-armed missile force would imply that North Korea might use nuclear weapons relatively early in a crisis, against ports and airfields to prevent the U.S. from amassing forces as it did against Saddam Hussein in 1991 and 2003. North Korea might see this as a war-winning strategy or hope that significant casualties would force the United States to cease hostilities,” Jeffrey Lewis wrote in a post for the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Obama called for Chinese President Xi Jinping to put more pressure on North Korea. “I indicated to him that if the Thaad bothered him, particularly since it has no purpose other than defensive and does not change the strategic balance between the United States and China, that they need to work with us more effectively to change Pyongyang’s behavior,” he said while traveling in Asia last week.
