Kim Jong Un is not crazy, just a cold calculator

North Korea’s latest threat of nuclear war is another salvo of incendiary rhetoric from the rogue nation, but it’s also part of a calculated power move by leader Kim Jong Un.

Experts say Kim’s fiery talk and defiance of the international community masks a core fact: His pursuit of a nuclear program is designed to establish the legitimacy of his regime inside North Korea and to gain international stature.

CIA Director Mike Pompeo said last week that the consensus in the intelligence community is that Kim is “rational” — even though some comments from North Korea may not seem so.

Sheila Miyoshi Jager, a professor at Oberlin College and author of Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea concurs, “Kim certainly is acting rationally and predictably if his objective is to secure his hold on power.”

North Korea’s test last month established that the isolated nation had built a missile capable of reaching Washington, D.C., and other East Coast cities. Kim believes that the threat of a nuclear attack on the United States might force Washington to rethink its commitment to defend South Korea if attacked. North Korea’s ultimate goal is to reunify the peninsula.

Kim believes nuclear weapons serve as a deterrent and provide economic leverage for North Korea, Jager said. Kim fears he will go the way of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi — both gave up their nuclear weapons programs and were overthrown.

[USA Today]

North Korea is a nuclear state

Analysts say North Korea is now a nuclear weapons power.

Every time North Korea does something provocative –which is often– Washington insists that Pyongyang must give up its nuclear weapons program.

Why would Kim Jong Un’s cash-strapped regime spend so much time and money on building these weapons only to give them up? And even if they were prepared to bargain them away eventually, why would they do so now, when Trump and his top aides are threatening military action?

“It’s a fantasy that they’re going to willingly give up their nuclear programs so long as Kim is in power. He saw the fate of Saddam and Gaddafi–why would he give up his nuclear weapons?” asked Vipin Narang, a nuclear nonproliferation specialist at MIT, referring to the former leaders of Iraq and Libya, both of whom are now deposed and dead.

[Washington Post]

Assassinating Kim Jong-un could go so wrong

There have been rumors and discussions about the assassination of Kim Jong-un in the West. But, as logical as it may seem to some warmongers, assassinating the North Korean leader is not a good idea.

The first reason why assassinating Kim Jong-un is not a good idea is that it would be a very difficult task to achieve. North Korea, at over 120,000 square kilometres, with mountains making up nearly 80 percent of its surface, is one of the most heavily fortified countries in the world, with …its tapestry of tunnels and between 6,000 to 8,000 subterranean facilities, all making it very easy for Kim to hide. If an attempt was made, and failed, the full nuclear anger of Kim Jong-un could be expected in response.

The second reason is this practice is illegal under US laws.

The third reason is that Kim Jong-un’s death by no means guarantees solving the problem. The more likely scenario is that power would pass directly to one of his children in accordance with a pre-agreed succession plan. Either his sister, Kim Yo-jong , or his wife, Ri Sol-ju will act as regent until his elected heir is old enough to take control of the communist de-facto monarchy. … The success of this type of regency and succession would depend on support from the military.

An alternate possibility is the country descending into absolute chaos after such an assassination. Recent examples of the deaths of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi show that the removal of such strongmen can bring dangerous fragmentation and enduring conflict that destabilize regions for decades ahead.

The final and most likely possibility is that the “head of the snake” keeps biting for a few minutes after it is decapitated … the North Korean military start firing everything they have.

[Excerpts of an Opinion by Alexander Gillespie, professor of international law at the University of Waikato, New Zealand]

North Korean cyberpower threat

Last week, a South Korean lawmaker revealed that North Korea had successfully broken into the South’s military networks to steal war plans, including for the “decapitation” of the North Korean leadership in the opening hours of a new Korean war.

North Korea is not motivated solely by politics: A chief political objective of the cyberprogram is to preserve the image of the North’s 33-year-old leader, Kim Jong-un. Its most famous cyberattack came in 2014, against Sony Pictures Entertainment, in a largely successful effort to block the release of a movie that satirized Mr. Kim, “The Interview.”

What has not been disclosed, until now, is that North Korea had also hacked into a British television network a few weeks earlier to stop it from broadcasting a drama about a nuclear scientist kidnapped in Pyongyang.

Intelligence officials estimate that North Korea also reaps hundreds of millions a dollars a year from ransomware, digital bank heists, online video game cracking, and more recently, hacks of South Korean Bitcoin exchanges. One former British intelligence chief estimates the take from its cyberheists may bring the North as much as $1 billion a year, or a third of the value of the nation’s exports.

A recent analysis by the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future found heavy North Korean internet activity in India, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nepal, Kenya, Mozambique, and Indonesia. In some cases, like that of New Zealand, North Korean hackers were simply routing their attacks through the country’s computers from abroad. In others, researchers believe they are now physically stationed in countries like India, where nearly one-fifth of Pyongyang’s cyberattacks now originate.

[New York Times]