Hankyoreh Calls for Allowing North Korea to Keep Its Nuclear Weapons
|The left wing South Korean newspaper, the Hankyoreh, has an editorial published saying that to move the peace process forward we all just need to learn to live with a North Korea with nuclear weapons:
During a seminar last year, an expert on the North Korean nuclear issue said the end point of denuclearization talks would be “a situation where a peace regime is so firmly in place that it wouldn’t even matter if North Korea were hiding a few nuclear weapons.” We might describe it as an approach of “killing the North Korean nuclear issue through a peace process.” Quite a few of the participants vehemently objected. “Are you suggesting we accept a nuclear North Korea?” they asked, insisting that the North should not be allowed to have even a single nuclear weapon.
(………) Even if Kim’s “complete denuclearization” is a different proposition from the one the North put forth at the time of the Agreed Framework, we have no way of knowing the timeline or conditions. The least we can say is that it doesn’t appear to be the “swift surrender” envisioned by the West. (……….)A world where North Korea does not possess a single nuclear weapon does not appear to be on the horizon for now. We need to practice somehow living with a nuclear-equipped North Korea. We will soon be facing a moment of truth where we will need to confront the reality of North Korea’s nuclear program.
Hankyoreh
You can read the whole thing at the link, but I think this is clearly a trial balloon by the Korean left. They realize that the Kim regime is not going to give up its nuclear weapons and now want to start socializing the concept of letting them keep some of their nukes to keep the peace process moving forward.
This all plays into the Kim regime’s confederation strategy where they can end the US-ROK alliance, withdraw US troops, remove the US nuclear umbrella, and then dictate terms of the confederation because they have the military advantage with their nuclear weapons.
The South Koreans can make all the side deals they want. They aren’t the ones whose opinion, in the end, really matters…
If there are any nukes left when the US determines the threat to be intolerable, “things will happen automatically.”