“During [the Bush] administration, North Korea has advanced its nuclear program and a potential route to a nuclear 9/11 is clearly visible,” said a statement Kerry’s campaign released September 12. “North Korea’s nuclear program is well ahead of what Saddam Hussein was even suspected of doing…. What is unfolding in North Korea is exactly the kind of disaster that it is an American president’s duty to prevent.”

“They have taken their eye off the real ball,” Kerry told the New York Times, according to a September 13 article. “They took it off in Afghanistan and shifted it to Iraq. They took it off in North Korea and shifted it to Iraq.”

These statements were preceded by a barrage of accusations against Pyongyang following a September 9 explosion in the northern region near the border with China. The blast reportedly sent a cloud into the air that extended two miles across. The capitalist media speculated that Pyongyang had carried out a nuclear test.

The government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) denied the charge. It said construction crews detonated the blast to remove a mountain to build a hydroelectric plant. U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell and other top officials also said the blast was “not any kind of nuclear event.” A British diplomat has reportedly been invited by Pyongyang to visit the site.

The U.S. government has stationed tens of thousands of troops near the 38th parallel, which has divided the country between north and south since the Korean War ended in 1953. In collaboration with Tokyo, Washington controls the waters around the peninsula, increasingly boarding and inspecting north Korean vessels. The U.S. government maintains a tight economic and trade embargo against the north Korean workers state, while Tokyo imposes economic sanctions against it.

Pyongyang has consistently maintained that it needs to develop its military defenses because of the U.S. troops in the south and Washington’s ever-present nuclear threat.

In October 2002 the U.S. government cut off oil shipments to the DPRK that had been established in a 1994 agreement under the Clinton administration. Tokyo and Seoul followed suit. Under the accord, Washington had promised to assist in the construction of nuclear power reactors in north Korea suitable only for energy generation, in exchange for assurances from Pyongyang that it would not develop nuclear weapons. The DPRK agreed to open some of its nuclear sites to UN surveillance.

In response, Pyongyang removed monitoring equipment from one of its nuclear power plants and expelled UN “inspectors” from the site in December 2002. It withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and said it would resume efforts to develop nuclear arms. Since February, Washington has drawn Moscow, Tokyo, Beijing, and Seoul into talks aimed at isolating Pyongyang and forcing it to dismantle its nuclear program.

This summer, Washington began moving its troops south of the DMZ, out of range of north Korean artillery. The move indicates that the U.S. military is adopting a strategy of launching devastating strikes against the DPRK in case of a new military conflict, rather than fighting another land war.  
 
 
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