It's mission Kimpossible

N. Korea threat to nix peace again

Now that he’s gotten the world’s attention, “Little Rocket Man” has spent a week testing its patience.

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un got in a snit over exercises involving nuclear-capable B-52 bombers that the United States, Japan and South Korea were planning to conduct over the Korean Peninsula, and threatened to cancel talks with the South over the outrage.

Days earlier, he said he might pull out of meeting President Trump on June 12 in Singapore. Kim was mad at National Security Adviser John Bolton’s call for North Korea to completely denuclearize.

It may have been Bolton’s choice of comparison that miffed him. Bolton appeared to extol Libya’s move to denuclearize, although that country’s dictator, Moammar Khadafy, was eventually deposed and killed.

Trump tried to placate Kim by disavowing Bolton’s remarks. As for the training over the Korean Peninsula, the United States removed the B-52s from the program.

Kim’s antics are crimping what appeared to be remarkable progress toward reducing the North Korean threat to world peace and boosting ties between Pyongyang, Seoul and Washington.

Kim has also barred South Koreans from joining an international group of journalists who are planning to witness the dismantling of a nuclear-weapons test site. The move came just a week after promises of “transparency” from Kim.

On Saturday, the diminutive dictator resurrected another issue: He demanded that Seoul return 12 North Korean defectors.

The North’s Red Cross accused South Korean officials of betraying the spirit of a recent inter-Korea summit by not returning the women, who came to the South in 2016 from China.

North Korea said Seoul should “severely punish those involved in the case, send our women citi- zens to their families without delay and thus show the will to improve North-South ties.”

Seoul insists the women want to stay in the South. North Korea is notorious for its labor camps, where beatings, rape, torture and punishing conditions are the norm, according to defectors.

Kim’s latest demands came on the same day that two North Koreans, including a military officer, were found in the Yellow Sea and defected to South Korea.