Returning to their role as professional Game of Chicken players, North Korea has once again led the world close to some sort of nuclear conflict with their powerful armada of nuclear missiles that have a range of wherever 90 seconds gets you. The bellicose rhetoric streaming from Pyongyang on a daily basis has been enough to crack the attention spans of western media in ebbs and flows. Few could blame the media, or the people paying attention to it for that matter, for thinking deep down this is just the latest in crying wolf from the Korean peninsula.
In late March, North Korea announced that it had officially scrapped the 1953 armistice agreement that ended open warfare between the North and South. It’s a card that the North has played multiple times since 1996 with no renewal of combat to follow on. The North has resorted to more provocative measures to earn a military response from the South and its western allies – more recently including the 2010 sinking of the Cheonan and shelling of Yeonpyeong Island. There have been three nuclear tests that have drawn international condemnation - in 2006, 2009, and February of this year – but again no military response.
The curious story of what a nation with military weaponry that has barely advanced beyond the best of what Communist countries had to offer in the 1960s and 70s really expects to gain from inviting some of the most advanced firepower on the planet to strike its territory continues to unfold – the current drama being latest chapter in a book that history has already written the ending for a few times: (probably) much ado about nothing.
