North Korea loves to threaten to start World War III. In the last week alone, it has warned Japan that it might launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against it and released a video detailing its plan for a three-day invasion of South Korea.
The threats – turning Seoul into a sea of flames, eradicating the American military presence and maybe America itself – are empty, of course. And not just because North Korea doesn’t actually have any incentive to start a second Korean War (it has every incentive to make empty threats). They’re also empty because the North Korean military is just not that powerful anymore.
There is no question that the North Korean military is very big, one of the world’s largest standing armies: 1.1 million troops, 4,200 tanks and 820 fighter jets. It’s also, by virtue of Pyongyang’s “military first” policies, perhaps the most privileged and best funded arm of the state, maybe outside of Kim Jong Un’s personal piggy banks.
Even the military’s size and political backing, though, can’t make up for North Korea’s isolation and impoverishment. Most of those fighter jets, for example, will never take off because the regime can’t afford enough fuel to fill them up. Even if they could somehow procure enough jet fuel, according to experts the fighters would have been shot out of the sky in the first few hours of a conflict. The tanks, likewise, are old and inferior.
North Korean propaganda frequently tries to make the case that, not only is their national army fearless and enormous, but it’s also breathtakingly advanced. This propaganda is for domestic consumption, of course, but seeing it from the outside is a nice reminder of the wide technological gap between North Korea and its neighbours South Korea and Japan, not to mention the United States.
Just today North Korea says it has ordered artillery and rocket units into “combat posture” to prepare to target US bases in Hawaii, Guam and the US mainland. The announcement, carried by KCNA news agency, follows days of strong rhetoric from Pyongyang. It came as South Korea marked the third anniversary of the sinking of the Cheonan warship, which left 46 sailors dead.
Why the threats?
Joint US-South Korea annual military drills have further angered the communist nation. In recent weeks its habitually fiery rhetoric has escalated – it has threatened the US with “pre-emptive nuclear attacks”, as well as strikes on US military bases in Japan.
“From this moment, the Supreme Command of the Korean People’s Army will be putting in combat duty posture No 1 all field artillery units including long-range artillery units and strategic rocket units that will target all enemy objects in US invasionary bases on its mainland, Hawaii and Guam,” the KCNA statement said.
North Korea is not thought to have the technology to strike the US mainland with either a nuclear weapon or a ballistic missile, but it is capable of targeting US military bases in the region with its mid-range missiles.
Another reason Pyongyang feels it can threaten the US is that it feels protected by China; the growing world superpower and replacement of the US at the top of world affairs. China occasionally chips in with a few words. Yesterday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said that he hoped that “relevant parties [would] exercise restraint so as to ease the tension”.
Where can North Korea be a threat? Through cyber-attacks.
Websites of associations for North Korean defectors said that their networks crashed on Tuesday last week. Officials said that South Korean broadcaster YTN’s network and a computer network used by seven local governments were also briefly paralysed, Yonhap news agency reported.
Daily NK, a news site focused on North Korea, said in a post on its Facebook page that it had “experienced a cyber-attack at 13:40″ local time (04:40 GMT) on Tuesday.
Free North Korea Radio, an radio broadcaster, also said that its website “was completely destroyed” after an attack around noon, Yonhap reported.
The presidential office, Cheong Wa Dae, said in a statement that the government was “closely working to confirm if the paralysis cases were caused by technical problems or hacking attacks”.
A cyber-attack on six South Korean banks and broadcasters last week disrupted 32,000 computers and some banking services.
The origin of the attack is not yet known, although there has been speculation that North Korea could have been to blame.
North Korea has been blamed for previous cyber-attacks on the South in 2009 and 2011.
Apart from the cyber threat Pyongyang is basically powerless. A bag of hot air. And Kim Jong Un – who those in the West hoped might drag North Korea forward from its current medieval state – is nothing more than a chubby disappointment; a muppet.
Written By Simon Brown
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