When will enough rhetoric be enough for young baby-face, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un? A new propaganda video released Sunday out of North Korea depicts a nuclear strike on Washington and then a threat to South Korea vowing a “merciless military strike” for slandering the mentally deranged Kim Jong-Un.
It is suspected that election 2016 may be delaying what many in the military counsel what should be done now; eliminate the nuclear threat?
The annual South Korea-U.S. war games have been running for the past few weeks, and that is the same time the diplomatically isolated North and its crazy young leader have been expecting an attack.
In typical tiresome manner, Pyongyang has been rattling sabers and issuing warlike rhetoric.
One possible reason for the North’s paranoia this year is that Seoul and Washington are running larger scale joint military field drills than ever before. The North has itself to blame for that, but it will probably not. The North’s executed what it called a large nuclear test in January and a month later, it tested a long-range rocket launch. The North continues to flaunt their new nuclear prowess, and not even China seems to be able to control the wacky young leader.
The North’s propaganda video carries the ominous title “Last Chance.” It depicts the North firing a submarine-launched nuclear missile that obliterates Washington, D.C. After that imagined hit (assuming they were able to get a submarine close enough and it had the required accuracy, all that is left of D.C. is a U.S. flag in flames. North Korea has produced previous childish videos. In 2013, one of their videos showed the White House in a sniper’s cross-hairs and the Capitol building exploding in a fireball.
So how serious are the fanatics in the North? That is the question of the day for the Pentagon and the White House. For the last year or so the North Korean government has been determined to up the ante in nuclear brinkmanship. They want to acquire a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) capability. The scenario may be the last straw in a crisis that has gone on since the end of the Korean War in 1953.
Verbal attacks on South Korean President Park Geun-Hye have also increased. Last Thursday, they ran a simulated long-range artillery drill that hit president Park’s office and official residence in Seoul. President Park accused Kim Jong-un of leading his country to self-destruction.
Not to be outdone, South Korean activists carried out a non-violent demonstration last Saturday. They sent three balloons over the massively defended DMZ. The balloons were carrying a cargo – thousands of anti-Pyongyang leaflets.
The South Korean activists may have seen balloons and leaflets as their non-violent way to make their presence known, but a day of flying balloons could be replaced by actual military action against nuclear North Korea which is playing a dangerously belligerent game.
