Recently, North Korea threatened to break the armistice with South Korea and warned they would employ “surgical strikes” with a nuclear precision weapon in an attempt to “unify” the Korean peninsula under the Communist government.
For those who may not know, this armistice is the agreement to cease fighting but not to necessarily make peace. However, it is no cause for alarm or fear that North Korea will act on its promise.
It seems like North Korea makes some type of hollow threat to either break the armistice with South Korea or bomb something almost every other week. Yet, after hundreds of childish rants and cries since the end of the Korean War in 1953, the armistice still stands.
North Korea will likely never attempt an all-out war of any kind, despite their threats, because the military knows all too well that they will be totally annihilated if they try. They would not survive the united assault that would occur from the South Koreans, the United States and possibly NATO intervention if such a war ever occurred. It would be the shortest war in history, over in less than a week, if even that.
However, North Korea continues to violate U.N. bans on developing nuclear weapons despite the numerous warnings and sanctions from countries across the globe.
While North Korea will never win a war, it does not mean they cannot cause serious damage and loss of life if they continue to strive to achieve nuclear weapons. The cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed in less than a day by atomic bombings and more than 200,000 died from the attack, not including the deadly effects of the radioactive fallout.
Nations like South Korea and Japan are close enough to North Korea that they are in range of a possible nuclear attack, and the loss of life would be devastating. Such an attack is a fairly plausible idea, since North Korea felt it had the fortitude to launch a ballistic rocket over Japan in 1998. While no one was hurt by the stunt, it caused the world to enter a state of panic and easily could have prompted a war.
The U.N., in order to force North Korea to comply with the nuclear weapons ban, has passed a sanction aimed at crippling North Korea’s financial transactions with other countries.
While the U.N. is trying its best to handle the farce that is the North Korean government, its actions are misguided mainly because it does not harm the aristocrats that run the state; rather, it only harms the innocent people who have the poor fortune to live under such tyranny.
The people have faced horrible famines and food shortages since the 1990s while resources are redistributed to government officials and high ranking military personnel.
What good would sanctions do?
The bureaucratic aristocracy will still get food and sit fat and happily while thousands of men, women and children starve. If we really want to hit the North Korean leaders hard, then policies must be made to strike a sense of fear in the government officials. A policy where we “speak softly but carry a big stick.”
Nick Chavez is an undeclared freshman and a contributing writer for the Daily 49er.
