Assassination is reminder of N.Korea WMD stash
KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA — For years, North Korea has rattled the world with its nuclear tests and its threats to visit a nuclear holocaust upon the United States. Now, the finding by Malaysian police that a brother of leader Kim Jong Un was assassinated with VX nerve agent is a stark reminder of the North’s lesser-known weapons of mass destruction: a stockpile of chemical and biological weapons.
Kim Jong Nam, the estranged elder brother of Kim Jong Un, was killed Feb. 13 when two women rubbed his face with the nerve agent at Kuala Lumpur Interna- tional Airport, the police said Friday.
If North Korean nation- als were indeed behind the killing, as Malaysian officials suggest, the use of VX raises several questions: Was the North Korean government using the attack to signal to the world its fearsome arse- nal of such dangerous weap- ons? Or was using the toxin simply an attempt to avoid detection in carrying out a brazen killing at one of the world’s busiest airports?
“By using VX in an international airport in the heart of Asia, North Korea has sent a very clear message to the world that it will strike its ene- mies anywhere in the world,” said Rohan Gunaratna, an expert on terrorism at the S. Rajaratnam School of Inter- national Studies in Singapore. “It also demonstrates the North Korean response in the event of an attack against North Korea.”
North Korea’s nuclear program has long been the most urgent concern of the United States and its allies, and the now-dormant six-party talks to curb the program did not address chemical and biological weapons.
“The reported use of VX reminds us that not only is the North’s nuclear-missile
threat serious but so are its asymmetric threats, including biochemical weapons and cyber that are all part of the regime’s WMD tool kit,” said Duyeon Kim, a Seoul-based
nonresident fellow at Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy.
The deadly use of a chemical weapon banned by international conventions in such a public manner could strengthen calls for the United States to put North Korea back on a list of terrorism-sponsoring countries, analysts said. The United States delisted the country in 2008 as part of an agreement aimed at ending North Korea’s nuclear programs — a deal that has since disintegrated.