CANADA CAUGHT IN MIDDLE
NORTH KOREAN MISSILES ‘CERTAINLY’ WILL FLY OVER US, EXPERT BELIEVES
The Winter Olympics in South Korea may spark a dialogue with North Korea, but dictator Kim Jong Un has shown no sign of ending his quest for nuclear weapons, and the hermit kingdom is not ready for a diplomatic solution, Japanese experts say.
In the past two years, the rogue dictatorship has significantly ramped up its nuclear and ballistic missile program.
In his New Year’s address, Kim made the rare overture to Seoul ahead of next month’s Olympics in nearby PyeongChang, while at the same time repeated fiery nuclear threats against the United States. He said he has a “nuclear button” on his office desk and warned that “the whole territory of the U.S. is within the range of our nuclear strike.”
While South Korea and Japan have been under immediate threat for decades, recent tests have put North America’s entire West Coast within range, and one expert expects missiles will “certainly” fly over Canada.
Two weeks from now, Canada and the U.S. are set to co-host an international summit in Vancouver to discuss the growing nuclear threat, but Japanese officials and scholars recently told the National Post that dialogue for the sake of dialogue is meaningless.
And rumours abound that the Americans are ready for more than just talk. U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted Tuesday that economic sanctions “are beginning to have a big impact,” but his administration has fuelled the idea that the U.S. could strike pre-emptively in an attempt to take out North Korea’s nuclear arsenal in one shot. “All options are on the table,” he said in August, a position the Japanese foreign minister has upheld.
Ken Jimbo, an assistant professor at Keio University in Tokyo, described the calculus that Trump might use to justify such an action.
“If you just leave the situation, what’s going to happen is the completion of North Korea as a nuclear weapons state. … North Korea says that’s only for deterrence purposes, but once they climb on the top they’ll try to see some different sceneries,” he said.
“Probably they will have a second or third wave of their offence, try to get rid of U.S. presence in Asia. They want to try to achieve their Northled unification processes. They can even threaten to proliferate their capability to the Middle East, so that’s a really nasty outcome. And if those issues are acutely perceived by the U.S., they have enough reason that they should act early.”
Jimbo stressed that he thinks this is a bad idea. North Korea likely has a contingency plan and last-ditch missiles could be launched at South Korea or Japan.
“What happens if those missiles are equipped with hydrogen bombs? I think Tokyo will end,” he said. “Are we able to risk ourselves with a very amateuristic calculation by U.S. military?”
Michishita Narushige, director of security and international studies at Tokyo’s National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, said the human and political cost of pre-emptive action is so high that it’s unlikely. “The U.S. would be sacrificing South Korean people’s lives for the security interests of the United States in the future,” he said.
According to Yoshimitsu Morihiro, the deputy director of defence policy at the Japanese Defence Ministry, North Korean missiles are becoming more accurate and harder to detect, with some being launched from submarines. But neither Morihiro nor his colleagues at the Foreign Ministry would speculate on the “hypothetical” likelihood of a U.S. strike.
Another important wild card is China, with which North Korea has its only functional land border. Narushige said China benefits, in a way, from Kim’s aggressions. If Asia is focused on the North Korean threat, there’s less concern about its construction of islands in the South China Sea.
It is unclear how China would react to an American military strike, but Japanese officials told the Post there are positive signs that China is on board with economic sanctions. A Foreign Affairs official noted “trade looks stopped,” mentioning one “symbolic” sign is that a big North Korean restaurant on China’s side of the border has shut down.
Adam Austen, press secretary for Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland, said “we hope” China will attend the Vancouver meeting.
Canadian involvement makes sense, Jimbo said, because “I think that North Korean (intercontinental ballistic missiles) will certainly fly over Canada.” But with the multilateral meeting, “probably the Japanese government does not want to kind of dilute the processes by inviting too many countries.”
Already invited are the 17 sending states in the United Nations Command mission that fought against the North in the Korean War, plus others such as India and Sweden.
Japanese officials weren’t so keen on the meeting in December, saying G7 countries could instead focus on closing “loopholes” by discouraging trade between Pyongyang and countries in Africa and the Middle East.
Still, a “pre-negotiation bargaining process” has begun and the international community should prepare for talks, Narushige said. “We have to start thinking about — not in public, but at least behind the scenes — what kind of agreement we might seek.”