North Korea Warns It Is on Brink of Nuclear War With South [View all]

[nadinbrzezinski]

SEOUL, South Korea — As North Korea warned foreigners on Tuesday that they might want to leave South Korea because the peninsula was on the brink of nuclear war — a statement that analysts dismissed as hyperbole — the American commander in the Pacific expressed worries that the North’s young leader, Kim Jong-un, might not have left himself an easy exit to reduce tensions.

A woman returning to South Korea from the Kaesong industrial park in the North on Tuesday.
“His father and his grandfather, as far as I can see, always figured into their provocation cycle an ‘off ramp,’ ” the commander, Adm. Samuel J. Locklear III, said during testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. “And it’s not clear to me that he has thought through how to get out of it. And so that’s what makes this scenario, I think, particularly challenging.”

The administration has settled on a strategy of refusing to make concessions to the North and has adopted a new plan to deter any hostilities by promising a proportionate response. In doing so, it hopes to reverse what is considers a long-term pattern in which the West offers aid to calm tensions and then North Korea breaks its promises to halt its nuclear program. But Obama administration officials acknowledge that the new strategy will work only if Mr. Kim either backs down or satisfies himself with a token show of force, like a missile test into the open ocean. The South Koreans have warned such a test could happen as early as this week.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/world/asia/south-korean-leader-seeks-to-end-vicious-cycle-with-north.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0


and this just keeps increasing the temperature...