Vol. 77/No. 15      April 22, 2013

After weeks of rising tensions, officials in Washington have toned down bellicose public statements about the current U.S.-South Korean military exercises aimed at the North and have publicly laid out a “counterprovocation” plan aimed at continuing to tighten the squeeze on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea while lessening the chances of armed conflict.

North Korea has responded to recent U.S. provocations with statements of its intentions to defend itself, and by declaring the 1953 cease-fire void, breaking off all military hot lines with South Korea, and pulling North Korea workers out of the joint Kaesong industrial park in the North and barring entry to the facilities from the South. Pyongyang also announced it was moving to strengthen its nuclear weapons capacity, but would work to further reduce nuclear proliferation if there were an “improvement of relations with hostile nuclear weapons states.”

The new U.S. counterprovocation plan with South Korea calls for a forceful, but “proportional,” retaliation to any response from North Korea.

‘A war with Korea must be avoided’

“It came barely five years after two atomic bombs were exploded over the defenseless cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed and irradiated hundreds of thousands of people.

“General Douglas MacArthur wanted to utilize atomic weapons against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea [North Korea]. Not even Harry Truman allowed that,” Castro said. “The People’s Republic of China lost one million valiant soldiers in order to prevent the installation of an enemy army on that country´s border with its homeland.”

The current crisis is rooted in the 1945 division of the Korean nation, imposed against the will of its people by U.S. imperialism, with the agreement of the Stalinist leadership in the Soviet Union. After imposing a brutal puppet dictatorship in the South, Washington carried out a bloody war, but failed to overthrow the government in the North. To this day, Washington refuses to sign a peace treaty with North Korea and maintains some 28,000 troops in the South. The U.S. military has long-range strategic missiles aimed at North Korea.

“The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was always friendly with Cuba,” Castro says, “as Cuba has always been, and will continue to be with her.

“Now that the country has demonstrated its technical and scientific achievements,” Castro said, referring to Pyongyang’s nuclear and ballistic missile technology, “we remind her of her duties to the countries which have been her great friends, and it would be unfair to forget that such a war would particularly affect more than 70 percent of the population of the planet.”

Seoul, the sixth most populated city in the world, would face immediate and massive devastation if war broke out on the peninsula, Pyongyang has said in public statements.

“If a conflict of that nature should break out there, the government of Barack Obama in his second term would be buried in a deluge of images which would present him as the most sinister character in the history of the United States,” said Castro. “The duty of avoiding war is also his and that of the people of the United States.”

Unlike in the past, the new U.S. counterprovocation plan was publicly disclosed.

“How we carry out a proportional retaliation without triggering a general conflict, or an assault on Seoul, is the hardest part of the problem,” Gary Samore, who until recently served as Obama’s top nuclear adviser, told the New York Times April 7.

David Maxwell, associate director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University and a retired army colonel who served five tours in South Korea, said in the same article that the responses “have to be delivered decisively, at the time and at the point of provocation.”

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has postponed tests of an intercontinental ballistic missile, concerned that they might “exacerbate the crisis with North Korea,” the Times reported.

The U.S. is pressing China, its main rival in Asia, to exert pressure on North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons. Officials in the Obama administration told the Times that “Beijing faces a choice between cracking down on North Korea or facing a larger American military presence in East Asia.” Beijing has no interest in a war on the peninsula that could lead to U.S. troops being stationed at its border.

Secretary of State John Kerry will start an Asian tour in Beijing April 13 and travel on to South Korea and Japan.

A week later, Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will spend four days in China for consultations with the Chinese military.  
 
 
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