Opinion | US must be wary of Kim Jong-un’s ‘olive branch’ offer to South Korea and its Winter Games
Ankit Panda writes that North Korean leader’s New Year’s speech aimed to drive a wedge between US and its allies, with the goal of breaking the alliances
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has rung in the new year with a bang. After all, why wouldn’t he? Despite three rounds of sanctions resolutions against his country at the UN Security Council, Kim’s 2017 was a success.
Not only did he oversee the successful launches of two new intercontinental ballistic missiles, bringing the US homeland within range of his nuclear weapons, but North Korea also carried out its first test of a claimed thermonuclear weapon. Whatever the device was that North Korea tested under Mount Mantap in September 2017, it was the most powerful explosion on Earth since China set off the largest underground nuclear test it had ever conducted, in 1992.
Accordingly, on New Year’s Day, Kim Jong-un declared his country’s nuclear forces “completed” and said he now possessed a deterrent sufficient to render a US attack on North Korea unthinkable. Kim, with his typical panache, said that a physical button to launch a nuclear strike had been installed in his office.
Setting aside the question of a physical button – Kim no doubt will have other arrangements for authorising a nuclear strike – the North Korean leader’s triumphant declarations must be taken seriously. US strategists and officials are still coming to terms with their new-found vulnerability to North Korean nuclear weapons in the US mainland.