Editor in Chief: Moh. Reza Huwaida Friday, March 29th, 2024

Tension between US and North Korea is at its Peak

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Tension between  US and North Korea is at its Peak

A strong tension between North Korea and the US ensued North Korea’s July 4 and July 28 tests of long-range missiles that may be able to reach the American continent, and the UN Security Council’s decision on August 5 to impose new harsh sanctions on North Korea. These sanctions will lead to irreparable loss for the North Korean if China and Russia agree.
The flurry of threat between the US president and his North Korean counterpart has triggered a sense of global consternation, mainly following the Donald Trump’s harsh rhetoric against North Korea.
George W. Bush’s administration treated North Korea as a rogue state, while it subsequently redoubled its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons in order to avoid the fate of Iraq. On October 09, 2006, North Korea announced it had conducted its first nuclear weapons test. Moreover, Barack Obama’s position towards North Korea was to resist making deals with them for the sake of defusing tension, a policy known as “strategic patience.” With the Trump’s administration, it is most likely that a whole new ball game will start.
Following the death of Kim Jong-un’s father, Kim Jong-il, on December 17, 2011, North Korea tried the White House’s patience through developing its nuclear arsenal despite international condemnation. Notable tests were performed in 2013 and 2016. On July 04, 2017, North Korea successfully conducted its first test of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), named Hwasong-14. Three weeks after its first ICBM launch, North Korea tested a second ICBM from Mupyong-ni, in the far north of the country, near an arms plant. It traveled 621 miles laterally for 45 minutes and landed in the Sea of Japan, inside Japan’s Economic Exclusion Zone, about 88 nautical miles west of Hokkaido. It marked the longest flight of a ballistic missile in North Korea’s history, according to the Pentagon. South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff said that the ICBM had traveled 2,300 miles into space. Experts fear that if North Korea angled the trajectory of that missile, it could potentially travel as far as Washington or New York.
In a statement, Trump condemned the launch, saying that North Korea’s “second such test in less than a month” is the “latest reckless and dangerous action” by Kim Jong-un’s regime. Nonetheless, North Korea said it would complete plans by mid-August to fire four intermediate-range missiles over Japan to land near the US Pacific island territory of Guam, after Trump said any threats by Pyongyang would be “met with fire and fury like the world has never seen”.
Furthermore, the North’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) blamed Trump for “driving the situation on the Korean peninsula to the brink of a nuclear war”, calling the US “the heinous nuclear war fanatic.”
Donald Trump’s harsh tone towards North Korea has likely shocked the world, mainly Korea’s neighboring countries that fear that a war breaks out between the two nuclear powers which will bring the world on the verge of destruction.

The world still remembers the Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to 1953, in which more than one million combatants and non-combatants were killed and almost every

Hujjatullah Zia is the permanent writer of the Daily Outlook Afghanistan. He can be reached at zia_hujjat@yahoo.com

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