Recent News
North Korea has recently been front and center on the world stage because of threats it has issued regarding its nuclear weapons and possible attacks. Kim Jong Un has increased North Korea's militant activity in order to advance the Juche Idea even further.
"History is written by unpredictable events and the response of others to those events, and this is certainly a situation where everything could change in an instant with one miscalculated move on the part of the North Koreans"
- Chris DeRusha, Department of Homeland Security
A blunt and explicit threat on Thursday from North Korea that its weapons programs would “target” the United States, and that it would proceed with a third and “higher-level” nuclear test, poses a stark challenge to the Obama administration at a time when it hoped to focus its major diplomatic effort on restraining Iran’s less-advanced nuclear program. |
The U.N. Security Council unanimously approved tough new sanctions on North Korea just hours after Pyongyang threatened a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the United States and its allies. The Security Council's actions to clamp down on the North's nuclear program follow the country's third nuclear test, carried out last month in defiance of previous United Nations' sanctions. The 15-0 Security Council vote Thursday includes China, which has backed North Korea in the past and is one of the country's few allies. |
North Korea has vowed to nullify nonaggression pacts with South Korea in response to the U.N. Security Council's new tough sanctions and planned joint South Korea-U.S. military drills. |
"This surge in provocative rhetoric is particularly dangerous," said Michael Auslin of the American Enterprise Institute. "South Korea's new president can't be seen to back down in the face of the North's threats, while Kim Jong Un may feel that his successful missile and nuclear tests give him the ability to keep pressuring Seoul. The two may wind up talking themselves into conflict." |
North Korea said it was nullifying all nonaggression agreements with South Korea, and one of its top generals claimed his country had nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles ready to blast off. South Korea said that if North Korea attacked the South with a nuclear weapon, the government of the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, would be “erased from the earth.” |
"South Korea is due to withdraw its last workers from the Kaesong industrial complex on Monday, leaving... empty for the first time since it opened almost a decade ago. The withdrawal of the 50 remaining managers will mark a serious deterioration in cross-border ties, coming soon after the North issued a string of threats against the South and its allies in protest at UN sanctions over its nuclear test in February and joint US-South-Korea military drills that ended on Monday. The regime has toned down its rhetoric in recent days as both sides moved to defuse tensions on the peninsula, but Kaesong's de facto closure is a serious blow to Seoul's attempts to maintain at least some form of engagement with its neighbour." |
"North Korea's hard-line army general, who is believed to have been responsible for attacks on South Korea in 2010 that killed 50 people, has been replaced by a relative unknown. ... The consensus is that the reshuffle at the top of the People's Armed Forces is part of a larger effort by leader Kim Jong Un to consolidate power over the military. |