nuclear-news

President Donald Trump claimed his deal-making prowess and great relationship with Kim Jong Un had averted a devastating war and neutralized the threat from North Korea’s nuclear weapons. South Korean President Moon Jae In said he was building an “irreversible and lasting peace” on the Korean peninsula.

What’s become glaringly obvious, however, is that all this progress was as provisional as Kim Jong Un’s promise last spring to halt tests of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.

The spectacular summits between the North Korean leader and his American and South Korean counterparts, the lofty joint statements that emerged from them, the Trump-Kim love letters and demolitions of a nuclear-test site and guard posts along the border between the Koreas—all of it was resting on an exceedingly fragile foundation, a foundation that is starting to crumble.

We’ve now descended to the point at which all that is keeping diplomacy with North Korea from collapsing is how many miles its missiles are flying.

Angered and humiliated by Trump’s decision to walk away from their second summit in Vietnam in February, Kim has gradually been dialing up the pressure on the United States and its allies. He’s reminding audiences at home and abroad that he’s quite capable of renewing his arms buildup in earnest if he doesn’t get his way in nuclear talks. (At the summit, Trump rejected North Korea’s offer to dismantle a nuclear facility in exchange for the lifting of most international sanctions against Pyongyang.)

“North Korea’s military posturing is partially for domestic political consumption and partially an effort to complicate politics for Trump and Moon to elicit concessions,” Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, told me. “But while the Kim regime is likely aiming its provocations just below the threshold for a response from the U.S. and its allies in terms of increasing sanctions or scaling up military exercises, it may miss the mark.”

Ahead of the Vietnam summit came the rebuilding of a rocket-launch site that Kim had partially demolished. Then came the test of a mysterious conventional weapon in April, the firing last weekend of what the South Korean government euphemistically referred to as “projectiles” that traveled between 45 and 125 miles, and the launch this week of two short-range missiles that flew 260 and 170 miles, respectively—after more than 500 days of no testing. To make sure the message wasn’t lost on the Americans, the latest weapons demonstration came as Trump’s North Korea envoy, Stephen Biegun, was visiting South Korea and as the U.S. military tested a nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, in California.

What Kim hasn’t done yet is break last year’s vow and resume nuclear and long-range missile tests, the actions that nearly precipitated a military conflict between the United States and North Korea in 2017 as the North refined its capability to target the U.S. homeland with nuclear-tipped ICBMs……

……… If negotiations fall apart and North Korea returns to expanding its nuclear-weapons arsenal (a program it has quietly continued to work on while negotiating with the United States), it would leave hopes of peace and denuclearization on the peninsula in tatters. It would also raise the risk of military conflict, whether by design or by accident, between the United States and North Korea…….https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/05/trump-and-kim-might-not-save-us-north-korea-diplomacy/589180/