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NEWS & LETTERS, June - July 2009
World in View
North Korean threat
In its latest confrontational declaration, North Korea's rulers promised to weaponize its stockpile of plutonium and to pursue uranium enrichment in defiance of a UN sanctions resolution. This follows two recent nuclear bomb tests, one of which was successful, and a number of ballistic missile tests.
The proposed sanctions included interdiction of North Korean ships at sea, which the U.S. administration has talked up as an option. North Korea says it will "wage war" against any interference with its shipping. The confrontation with the U.S. has been deepened by the show trial of two American women reporters, who have been sentenced to 12 years of hard labor in a North Korean prison camp.
While North Korea's nuclear bomb tests have met with condemnation from most quarters, including neighboring China, this criticism is unlikely to sway Kim Jong Il or his presumptive successor, his son Kim Jong Un.
North Korea's official ideology, "Juche," or "self-reliance," was never a form of Marxism, or of genuine self-reliance. It was a philosophy created to bolster the fortunes of the North Korean ruling class, the Kim dynasty, as it maneuvered in a world in which state-capitalist rulers competed for single-world mastery, whether as the "socialist camp" against the "imperialist camp," or later as the rivalry of Russia and China for domination of the Communist world.
Kim Jong Il added the principle of "songun," or "military first," in which all scant resources are directed to serving military purposes above all. U.S. president George W. Bush's stance on the "axis of evil" did a lot to fan life into the dying embers of Kim's ideology. Now Kim seems to be forging a role for North Korea as a minor nuclear power, in a world in which nuclear weapons are a threat even in local conflicts.
--Gerry Emmett
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