Women from around the world cross the DMZ – De-Militarized Zone – border between North and South Korea in 2015. To the left TFF Associate Mairead Maguire. Reported here by the Daily Mail. By Samuel S. Kim* Abstract The often-used description in the American mainstream media and geopolitical literature of “North Korea’s nuclear aggression” is misleading. I argue in the first section that Pyongyang’s nuclear strategy has been significantly shaped by the perceived U.S. nuclear existential threat since the early 1950s, portending a quest for a self-reliant nuclear deterrent for the DPRK (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea). The shifting role and impact of U.S.-China competition in the course of the first and second U.S.-DPRK nuclear standoffs is explored as background for examining, in the second section, an intensified nuclear confrontation in the first half of 2017. The concluding section considers common-security engagement in charting an alternative pathway toward...
