Children climb up the launcher of the surface-to-air guided missile system, Cheongung, during an event at the 18th Fighter Wing in the city of Gangneung on South Korea’s eastern coast on Sept. 21, 2017, to celebrate the first independent sortie that the Air Force made from Gangneung Air Base during the 1950-53 Korean War. (Yonhap)
Would such a test be pretext to launch a bombing strike, especially since they would have to fire over Japan to do this nuclear test?:
The United States began using the Marshall Islands as a nuclear testing site beginning in 1946.
Hours later, Kim’s foreign minister told reporters in New York that Pyongyang could launch a nuclear missile test in response. “This could probably mean the strongest hydrogen bomb test over the Pacific Ocean. Regarding which measures to take, I don’t really know since it is what Kim Jong Un does,” said Ri. [CNN]
Famous for using bombastic, derogatory and often-awkward English slams against enemies, North Korean state media sent people scrambling for dictionaries Friday with a dispatch that quotes leader Kim Jong Un calling President Donald Trump “the mentally deranged U.S. dotard.”
The what?
Dotard means a person in a feeble or childish state due to old age. It’s a translation of a Korean word, “neukdari,” which is a derogatory reference to an old person.
It was used in an unusual direct statement from Kim that the Korean Central News Agency transmitted verbatim in response to Trump’s speech at the U.N. this week, in which he mocked Kim as a “Rocket Man” on a “suicide mission,” and said that if the U.S. is “forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.” [Associated Press]
You can read more at the link. Here is what President Trump had to say via Twitter in response:
Kim Jong Un of North Korea, who is obviously a madman who doesn't mind starving or killing his people, will be tested like never before!
Wouldn’t it be great if Kim Jong-un got his own Twitter account and him and President Trump could just have a Twitter war instead of going back in forth in the media like this?
Good luck New York City trying to get this money out of North Korea:
As if the U.S. and North Korea hadn’t had enough bilateral tensions, outstanding parking fines from North Korea’s diplomatic mission to the U.N. add insult to injury. According to NBC New York, the mission owes as much as $156,000 to the city of New York for more than 1,300 unpaid tickets that date back to the 1990s.
Jong Jo, identified as secretary of North Korea’s U.N. mission, came to his country’s defense. “It is false,” Jong told NBC New York. “Whenever we have a ticket, we pay. Because, you know, if we have three tickets the city does not allow us to renew their permission.”
In fact, a 2002 Memorandum of Understanding between the State Department and New York does allow the city to deny a diplomatic parking decal from vehicles that have three or more unpaid parking tickets, NBC New York reported. Even though the majority of tickets accrued by the diplomatic mission occurred after 2002, the city said that debt from parking tickets prior to that year still has to be paid. [Newsweek]
Here is an excerpt from article forwarded to me that speculates how the Kim regime may try and use their missiles to launch provocations against the United States to cause a split in the US-ROK alliance:
You can read the rest at the link. However, I don’t think the Kim regime would use their missiles to launch a provocation against the United States because the South Koreans would have to back US retaliations as part of the US-ROK alliance. However, where things muddier is what if he launched a missile provocation against Japan? Would the South Korean government be willing to back retaliation in support of Japan?
A soldier is pushed out of a trench by members of the opposing team at a guerrilla training facility in the city of Sejong, central South Korea, on Sept. 21, 2017, as they train to build their physical strength. (Yonhap)
I doubt this will be the only response from North Korea after President Trump’s very blunt address given towards North Korea at the UN this week:
North Korea has ridiculed President Donald Trump’s threats over its missile program, comparing his comments during his maiden speech to the United Nations to the sound of a “barking dog.”
Speaking on Tuesday, Trump said the U.S. would “have no choice but to totally destroy” North Korea and earlier this week on Twitter referred to Kim Jong Un as “Rocket Man.”
North Korea’s delegation left the hall in New York ahead of Trump’s speech, but the country’s foreign minister, Ri Yong Ho, compared Trump’s remarks to the sound of a dog barking in televized remarks to the press in New York.
“There is a saying that goes: ‘Even when dogs bark, the parade goes on’,” Ri said, quoted in Reuters. “If [Trump] was thinking about surprising us with dog-barking sounds then he is clearly dreaming.”
When asked about the “Rocket Man” remarks, Ri quipped “I feel sorry for his aides,” a perceptive comment given the now viral image on social media showing Trump’s Chief of Staff John Kelly covering his eyes in apparent dismay at the president’s speech. [Newsweek]
A ROK Drop favorite Dr. Andrei Lankov has an article published in NK News that once again advocates for a “freeze deal” with North Korea:
Andrei Lankov
Of course, it is politically impossible to be excessively frank about such a plan, as the admission that North Korea is a de facto nuclear state would damage international non-proliferation efforts and bring about a tidal wave of virtue signaling behavior from U.S. hard-liners, including many legislators.
To cushion these problems, a freeze deal will have to be presented as merely the “first step on the long and winding road to North Korea’s denuclearization” which will surely happen at some point in a rather distant future.
So far, the idea of a freeze, while widely discussed among the mid-level officials, remains a taboo at the higher levels of the U.S. bureaucracy. This is vital: this is exactly the levels where such decisions have to be made.
This author is skeptical about the immediate prospects of a freeze. It will take some time (probably, years) before U.S. decision makers get over their natural tendency to deny the unpleasant truth. Nonetheless, serious discussion of a freeze as a theoretical possibility has already begun, and numerous opponents of this idea have already made good arguments about what is problematic about such a plan.
Unfortunately, in spite of being a long-time proponent of the freeze idea, I cannot help but admit that many of their arguments are correct, but on balance, there are still valid reasons to accept the freeze solution as a deal which, while flawed and imperfect, is still better than its alternatives. [NK News]
You can read more at the link, but as I have said before I think any freeze deal should include robust inspections and the risk of a retaliatory bombing strike if it is not complied with. The risk of war on the peninsula by noncompliance by the Kim regime would give motivation to the Chinese to make sure the Kim regime is complying with the deal.
A college student, who requested to be identified as Park, was supposed to start an internship at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul this December.
After receiving a letter of acceptance July 21, she was preparing for the program — finding a residence in Seoul and buying work clothes — while dreaming of a future career after the internship.
On Sept. 6, however, she learned the program was suspended. She received an email from the embassy, which read “The U.S. Embassy will not be moving forward with our Winter Internship at this time.”
Explanations from the embassy frustrated her.
“The embassy staff simply repeated the answer that the decision was made due to personnel affairs in the organization,” Park told The Korea Times.
The cancellation of the internship program was more devastating for Park because the winter program was her last chance to work there before her graduation. “I even gave up a full-time paid job which gave me a final acceptance notification to do the internship, because the latter was only allowed for university students,” Park said. [Korea Times]
You can read more at the link, but this is what happens when interns complain about not getting paid.
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