RISING TENSIONS
Recent events in the escalation of nuclear tensions on the Korean Peninsula:
March 7: The U.N. Security Council imposes tough sanctions against North Korea to punish it for conducting a nuclear test on Feb. 12 in defiance of U.N. resolutions banning it from nuclear and missile activity.
March 11: South Korea and the U.S. begin annual joint military drills. North Korea responds by cutting a hotline with South Korea and voiding the 60-year-old armistice ending the Korean War.
March 12: North Korean state media report that the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un, urged front-line troops to be on “maximum alert” and warned that “war can break out right now.”
March 20: Coordinated cyberattacks in South Korea knock out computers and servers at three major TV networks and three banks. North Korean involvement is suspected.
March 22: North Korea condemns a U.N. resolution approving a formal investigation into its suspected human rights violations.
March 27: North Korea cuts a military hotline to its Kaesong industrial complex, which is jointly run with the South. Operations at the complex continue.
March 28: The U.S. says two of its nuclear-capable B-2 bombers joined the military drills with South Korea.
March 29: Kim signs a rocket preparation plan and orders his forces on standby to strike the U.S. mainland, South Korea, Guam and Hawaii.
March 30: North Korea warns that “inter-Korean relations have naturally entered the state of war,” and says it would retaliate against any U.S. and South Korean provocations without notice.
Monday: The U.S. announces it sent F-22 stealth fighter jets to participate in the U.S.-South Korean war games.
Tuesday: North Korea’s atomic energy department says it will restart a plutonium reactor and a uranium enrichment plant at its main Nyongbyon nuclear complex and increase production of nuclear weapons material.
Wednesday: North Korea bars South Koreans from going to their jobs at the Kaesong industrial complex and closes the border to trucks carrying materials. The United States dispatches a missile defense system to Guam, while North Korea threatens a nuclear strike against the U.S.
The United States announced Wednesday that it was deploying an advanced missile defense system to Guam, to protect one of the main American naval and air bases in the Pacific against North Korean attack. The North renewed its threat to launch a nuclear attack on the United States.
Pentagon officials say that the decision to rush the missile shield to Guam was “a precautionary move to strengthen our regional defense posture against the North Korean regional ballistic missile threat.”
But its primary importance is that, once installed, the land-based system will free up two Aegis-class missile-defense warships to be repositioned far closer to the North Korean coast. That will give President Barack Obama more options to decide whether to attempt to shoot down the North’s increasingly sophisticated arsenal of missiles, perhaps during a North Korean missile test.
“We haven’t made any decisions,” a senior administration official said. “But we want as many options as possible.”
Pyongyang, for its part, said America’s ever-escalating hostile policy toward North Korea “will be smashed” by the North’s nuclear strike and the “merciless operation” of its armed forces.
“The U.S. had better ponder over the prevailing grave situation,” said the translated statement. The Pentagon had no immediate reaction.
North Korea’s threat capped a week of psychological warfare and military moves by both sides that have rattled the region.
Earlier Wednesday, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said North Korea has “ratcheted up their bellicose, dangerous rhetoric and some of the actions they’ve taken over the last few weeks present a real and clear danger and threat.”
Despite its rhetoric, North Korea has not demonstrated that its missiles have the range to hit Guam or Hawaii, much less the U.S. mainland. Nor is it known to have a nuclear warhead small enough to be carried on its missiles. But U.S. officials said its missile capabilities have expanded in recent years more rapidly than predicted.
Asked about Guam recently, Undersecretary of Defense James Miller said the U.S. missile defense system “provides coverage of not just the continental United States, but all the United States.”
But some analysts note that the U.S. military’s own maps of the geographic reach of the ground-based interceptor shows Guam uncovered.
Defense officials said that Guam was still covered by missile-carrying U.S. warships in the Pacific equipped to shoot down ballistic missiles. Sending the ground-based system to Guam beefs up the U.S. defense.
The missile defense system, which the Pentagon said would arrive in Guam “in coming weeks,” includes a truck-mounted launcher, interceptor missiles, a tracking radar and a fire-control computer system.
It shoots interceptors designed to hit ballistic missiles in the final phase of their flight as they descend toward their targets.
Tensions have escalated between North and South Korea in recent weeks. The communist North has vowed to increase production of nuclear weapons materials, and threatened a pre-emptive strike against the U.S.
On Wednesday, a U.S. research institute said North Korea has already begun construction at a shuttered plutonium reactor that it is vowing to restart and it could be back in operation sooner than expected.
The U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies has analyzed recent commercial satellite imagery of the Nyongbyon nuclear facility, where the reactor was shut down in 2007 under the terms of a disarmament agreement. A cooling tower for the reactor was destroyed in 2008.
The analysis published on the institute’s website “38 North” says that rebuilding the tower would take six months, but a March 27 photo shows work may have started for an alternative cooling system that could take just weeks.
“Pyongyang may be poised to prove wrong conventional wisdom that it will take months to restart its reactor, and in the bargain it is also showing us that they mean business by accelerating the process of producing more material for nuclear weapons,” said Joel Wit, 38 North editor and a former U.S. State Department official.
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters Tuesday that restarting the plutonium reactor would be “extremely alarming” but added: “There’s a long way to go between a stated intention and actually being able to pull it off.”
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