The United States and South Korea have totally disregarded North Korea's
repeated objections by launching the 10-day joint war games Ulchi Freedom
Guardian on August 16, involving 530,000 forces from the United States, South
Korea and seven other countries.
The number of US-led multilateral combat troops is more than enough to
undertake a surprise invasion of North Korea.
Objectives of the games
It is all too obvious that in their multilateral war games, the Americans seek
an opportunity to invade North Korea, capture its top leadership and establish
a pro-American regime.
Tokyo's Asahi Shimbun August 13 quoted military sources as
revealing that far from defensive, the war game is part of the US-South Korea
joint operation plan "5027", with troops training for a wide variety of
missions, including a full-scale multilateral coalition invasion of North
Korea, and a bid to capture supreme leader Kim Jong-il and topple the North
Korean regime.
Agence France-Presse reported on August 7 that one of the key objectives of the
exercises was a search and destroy mission for North Korean nuclear weapons:
"US
and South Korean troops will practice destroying North Korean weapons of mass
destruction during an annual joint exercise this month to improve their
combat-readiness," according to a report.
"The allies will form a combined unit called the Joint Task Force for
Elimination (JTF-E) when they begin a 10-day Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercise on
August 16," South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported.
It seems
the Americans are mad enough to risk initiating war with North Korea.
A North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman stated on August 17:
The US
is staging exercises for a war of aggression against its dialogue partner while
putting up signboard of dialogue. This incoherent behavior on the part of the
US is only adding to the skepticism about whether it is sincere towards
dialogue or not.
It is very ill-boding that the US let "a special action unit" participate in
the on-going joint military exercises as it is one tasked with detecting and
destroying nuclear weapons of the DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea].
The prevailing situation goes to prove that the US is not set to realize the
denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula through dialogue and negotiations but
sees an opportunity to deprive it of nuclear deterrent by a brigandish method.
No attempt on the part of the US to do harm to the DPRK by force of arms can go
with dialogue. This will only face the mode of merciless counteraction of
Korean-style.
Nobel Peace Prize winning Barack Obama is most
likely to be the first American president who will be fighting six aggressive
wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen and Korea, to paraphrase the
words of former Reuters columnist Sherwood Ross. [1]
Untoward incident could unleash shooting war
The divided and heavily armed Korean Peninsula remains the most inflammable
global flashpoint, with any conflict sparked there likely to become a
full-blown thermonuclear war involving the world's fourth-most powerful nuclear
weapons state and its most powerful.
Any incident in Korea by design, accident, or miscalculation could erupt into a
devastating DPRK-US war, with the Metropolitan US serving as a main war
theater.
Rodong Sinmun warned on August 16: "The Korean Peninsula is faced with the
worst crisis ever. An all-out war can be triggered by any accident."
Recent incidents illustrate the real danger of miscalculation leading to a
total shooting war, given the volatile situation on the Land of Morning Calm.
1. The most recent case in point is the August 10 shelling of North Korea by
the South. Frightened South Korea marines on Yeonpyeong Island mistook three
noises from a North Korean construction site across the narrow channel for
artillery rounds, taking an hour to respond with three to five artillery
rounds.
The episode serves as a potent reminder to the world that the slightest
incident can lead to war. A reportedly malfunctioning firefinder
counter-artillery radar system seems to partly account for the panicky South
Korean reaction.
South Korean conservative newspaper the Joong Ang Daily reported August 17:
"A military source said that radar installed to detect hostile fire did not
work last week when North Korea fired five shots toward the Northern Limit Line
(NLL), the disputed maritime border, on Aug 10.
"'We must confirm the location of the source of the firing through the ARTHUR
(Artillery Hunting Radar) and HALO (hostile artillery location) systems, but
ARTHUR failed to operate, resulting in a failure to determine the source of the
fire,' said the source."
BBC reported on November 25 last year the aggressive nature of troops on the
South Korea-held five islands in North Korean waters.
"Seen in this sense, they (five islands including Yeonpyeong Island) could
provide staging bases for flanking amphibious attacks into North Korea if South
Korea ever takes the offensive."
2. An almost catastrophic incident took place at dawn on June 17 near Inchon.
South Korean marines stationed on Gyodong Island near Inchon Airport fired
rifles at a civilian South Korean jetliner Airbus A320 with 119 people aboard
as it was descending to land, after mistaking it for a North Korean military
aircraft.
The Asiana Airlines flight was carrying 119 people from the Chinese city of
Chengdu.
About 600 civilian aircraft fly near the island every day, including those
flying across the NLL, but they face a perennial risk of being misidentified as
a hostile warplane.
It is nothing short of a miracle that the Airbus A320 was not hit and nobody
harmed.
3. On March 26, 2010, the high-tech South Korean corvette Sokcho fired
130 rounds at flocks of birds, mistaking them for a hostile flying object. The
innocent birds looked like a North Korean warplane just at a time when an
alleged North Korean midget submarine had managed to escape with impunity after
torpedoing the hapless Cheonan deep inside security-tight South Korean
waters.
The South Korean military's habit of firing at the wrong target increases the
risk of an incident running out of control.
CNN aired a story December 16, headlined: "General: South Korea Drill Could
Cause Chain Reaction."
F/A-18 pilot-turned Marine Corp General James Cartwright told the press in the
Pentagon, "What we worry about, obviously, is if that it [the drill] is
misunderstood or if it's taken advantage of as an opportunity.
"If North Korea were to react to that in a negative way and fire back at those
firing positions on the islands, that would start potentially a chain reaction
of firing and counter-firing.
"What you don't want to have happen out of that is ... for us to lose control
of the escalation. That's the concern."
Agence France-Presse on December 11 quoted former chief of US intelligence
retired admiral Dennis Blair as saying that South Korea "will be taking
military action against North Korea".
New Korean war differs from other wars
Obama and the Americans seem to be incapable of realizing that North Korea is
the wrong enemy, much less that a new Korean War would be fundamentally
different from all other wars including the two world wars.
Two things will distinguish a likely American Conflict or DPRK-US War from
previous wars.
The first essential difference is that the US mainland will become the main
theater of war for the first time since the US Civil War (1861-1865), giving
the Americans an opportunity to know what it is like to have war fought on
their own land, not on faraway soil.
The US previously prospered by waging aggressive wars on other countries. Thus
far, the Americans could afford to feel safe and comfortable while watching TV
footage of war scenes from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Libya as if they
were fires raging across the river.
The utmost collateral damage has been that some American veterans were killed
or returned home as amputees, with post traumatic stress disorder, only to be
left unemployed and homeless.
However, this will no longer be the case.
At long last, it is Americans' turn to have see their homeland ravaged.
An young North Korea in 1950-53 was unable to carry the war all the way across
the Pacific Ocean to strike back, but the present-day North Korea stands out as
a fortress nuclear weapons state that can withstand massive American ICBM
(Intercontinental ballistic missile) attacks and launch direct retaliatory
transpacific strikes on the Metropolitan USA.
The second essential difference is that the next war in Korea, that is, the
American Conflict or the DPRK-USA War would be the first actual full-fledged
nuclear, thermonuclear war that mankind has ever seen, in no way similar to the
type of nuclear warfare described in science fiction novels or films.
North Korea is unique among the nuclear powers in two respects: One is that the
Far Eastern country, founded by legendary peerless hero Kim Il-sung, is the
first country to engage and badly maul the world's only superpower in three
years of modern warfare when it was most powerful, after vanquishing Nazi
Germany and Imperial Japan.
The other is that North Korea is fully ready to go the length of fighting
mankind's first and last nuclear exchange with the US.
The DPRK led by two Kim Il-sungs - the ever-victorious iron-willed brilliant
commander Kim Jong-il and his heir designate Kim Jong-eun - is different from
Russia under Nikita Khrushchev which backed down in the 1962 Cuban missile
crisis.
Khrushchev and his company never fought the Americans in war. As a rule, most
countries are afraid to engage the Americans. As the case is with them, North
Korea is the last to favor war with the Americans.
However, it is no exaggeration to say that the two North Korean leaders are
just one click away from ordering a retaliatory nuclear strike on the US
military forces in Guam, Hawaii and metropolitan centers on the US mainland.
On behalf of Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-eun will fire highly
destructive weapons of like Americans have never heard of or imagined to
evaporate the US.
The North Koreans are too proud of being descendents of the ancient
civilizations of Koguryo 2,000 years ago and Dankun Korea 5,000 years ago, to
leave the Land of morning Calm divided forever with the southern half under the
control of the trigger-happy, predatory US. The North Koreans prefer to fight
and die in honor rather than kowtow to the arrogant Americans.
At the expense of comforts of a better life, North Koreans have devoted more
than half a century to preparing for nuclear war with the Americans. All
available resources have been used to convert the whole country into a
fortress, including arming the entire population and indigenously turning out
all types of nuclear thermonuclear weapons, and developing long-range delivery
capabilities and digital warfare assets.
An apocalyptic Day After Tommorow-like scenario will unfold throughout
the US, with the skyscrapers of major cities consumed in a sea of thermonuclear
conflagration. The nuclear exchange will begin with retaliatory North Korean
ICBMs detonating hydrogen bombs in outer space far above the US mainland,
leaving most of the country powerless.
New York, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco and major cities should be torched
by ICBMs streaking from North Korea with scores of nuclear power stations
exploding, each spewing as much radioactive fallout as 150-180 H-bombs.
Editor's Note
1. Sherwood Ross wishes to make clear that he was mistakenly paraphrased in his article and has never accused President Barack Obama of desiring to make war on Korea. While he did say that Obama was waging war in six countries at once: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya and Sudan, he did not include Korea. He also wishes to stress that he was a workplace contributor to Reuters, not writing about foreign policy.
Kim Myong Chol is author of a number of books and papers in Korean,
Japanese and English on North Korea, including Kim Jong-il's Strategy
for Reunification. He has a PhD from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's
Academy of Social Sciences and is often called an "unofficial" spokesman of Kim
Jong-il and North Korea.
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