North Korea's war talk is really dangerous

WASHINGTON, March 6 (UPI) -- North Korea is sliding toward a dangerously confrontational and aggressive stance against South Korea and the United States. New hard-liners lead Pyongyang's military forces -- with potential consequences no one can truly foresee.

North Korea officially stated this week it was worried about a U.S.-South Korean invasion, and the Pyongyang government issued a warning to keep South Korean civilian aircraft away from its airspace. The South Korean government of strongly pro-American President Lee Myung-bak is taking that warning seriously and has diverted those flights, just in case.

North Korea said it is also worried about a regular U.S.-South Korean military exercise planned for next week. The 12-day annual exercise always draws ire from North Korea, but overall tensions between North and South are higher this year. Rationally, there should be no danger of this turning into a shooting war, and it probably won't.

However, a new caution must be added: The North Korean leadership this year is more unknown, inexperienced and potentially both fearful and reckless than at any time since the end of the Korean War. And North Korea is simultaneously more strategically powerful and economically desperate than it has been in many years. That paradox is bad news for prospects of continued peace and stability.

North Korea has either reached, or is about to reach, its long-cherished goals of having relatively reliable intercontinental ballistic missiles and its own nuclear warheads to put on them. The country has announced that it plans to launch a communications satellite shortly. As we pointed out in these columns on Feb. 24, missile power is fungible; it is interchangeable between civilian and strategic nuclear uses. If Pyongyang, like Iran, can achieve the capability to launch a satellite into low Earth orbit, it will also have the capability to send an intercontinental ballistic missile carrying a nuclear warhead to hit any target in South Korea, Japan and possibly even parts of the United States.

But if North Korea's leaders finally have the nuclear and long-range ICBM power projection they have craved for so long, they have paid for it in large part by the sufferings of their people, and that makes their possible military calculations more unpredictable than ever.

The Washington Post on Friday published a detailed article on the continuing endemic malnutrition problems in North Korea by its respected veteran foreign correspondent Blaine Harden. Harden noted that North Korean teenagers who escape to South Korea are on average 5 inches shorter and 25 pounds lighter than their southern counterparts. He wrote that North Korea needs to grow 5.5 million tons of rice and cereal grains a year to feed its 23.5 million people, but it only grows around 4.4 million tons, a shortfall of around 18 percent.

In fact, the problem is far worse as a disproportionate amount of the food grown and that has been brought in by U.N. relief agencies goes through private local markets to the relatively wealthy and those concentrated in larger towns and cities. Harden reported that in outlying provinces of the mountainous, inhospitable northern country, long-term, endemic malnutrition is far worse. He cited a U.N. report in December that warned 37 percent of the population would need international food aid in the coming year.

Making North Korea even more unstable and unpredictable is the new team of hawks that have been appointed to run its armed forces through the dominant National Defense Commission.

As United Press International's Lee Jong-Heon reported Feb. 12, Vice Marshal Kim Yong Chun, 73, has been named minister of the People's Armed Forces, replacing Kim Il Chol, who had been in the defense minister post since 2000, according to the North's official Korean Central News Agency.

Gen. Ri Yong Ho has been appointed chief of the army's General Staff, a post equivalent to that of the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, replacing Kim Kyok Sik, who had served in the post for the past two years.

Both Kim and Ri may be rising to full control over the armed forces at the expense of possibly ailing North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. Or Kim Jong Il, emboldened by the prospect of achieving his coveted ICBM capability at long last, may have gone more hawkish himself. Certainly, North Korea's public statements have carried an increasingly warlike tone in recent weeks. One cannot afford to ignore such rhetoric. North Korea has not shaken the world since it invaded South Korea almost 59 years ago. But no one ever expected that invasion. Irrational acts of aggression always come as a surprise.