Pyongyang shocked the world for the first time in January 2016 when North Korea announced that it had successfully conducted requisite scrutiny on “Hydrogen Bomb”. The announcement came anon after an earthquake was registered close to Punggye-re nuclear site of the infamous nation. Since then, there has been no looking back. With its incessant invective on the POTUS and threats of “super mighty strikes” on South Korea, King Jong-un, the North Korean despot, has left no stone unturned in devastating any ray of hope for peace in the land. Though the world, initially took him as an abysmal laughing stock but after having tested its most powerful nuclear bomb in September, 2016 which even led to a “5.3 Richter earthquake”, the conditions have become grave.
The whole Pentagon as well as the political lobbies of the world are in a state of in- toto pandemonium following the verbal clashes between the world’s most powerful leader and the world’s most erratic person: The US president Donald Trump and North Korean dictator King Jong-un. Though, the political analysts are quick to repudiate any possibility of a direct nuclear war, but still the recent courses of actions are a major threat to world harmony since the Korean peninsula is in itself a geopolitically empowered area with stakeholders like The Russian Federation, Japan and People’s Republic of China (PRC) along with the United States of America.
Albeit the debate over the future of the Korean peninsula never fades into oblivion but lately North Korea’s firing of ballistic missiles in the Sea of Japan to just 190 miles off the west coast of Japan ahead of the US-China summit on curbing the country’s nuclear weapons program, has again plunged the topic into the limelight of the world’s politics and this was also conducive to the US president Mr. Trump’s viral comment, “we are sending an armada.”
North Korea is unequivocally a nuisance but haplessly intractable also. The intransigent and quaintly secluded behaviour of the North Korean tyrants have exacerbate the condition so much that today there seems to be no way back.
It all commenced with the eruption “625 upheaval” or the Korean War (1950-53) between North and South Korea. Though, in the west, this war is known as the “Forgotten war” (because of no public attention to the war as compared to other eastern wars such as the Indo-China (Vietnamese) war) but ironically the consequences of this war are much more robustly felt today and amusingly as far as the international laws are concerned, both countries are still at war (technically) owing to no written peace agreement.
The Korean War started due to animosity of North Korea towards the South Korea. Pyongyang invaded Seoul on June 25, 1950 as part of the belligerent strategy of Kim II-sung , grandfather of the current dictator King Jong-un. North Korean armies infringed the 38th parallel and launched a full-fledged military assault on South Korea. Though the war was an illegitimate “move forward” policy of North Korea, but because that epoch was of the notorious “cold war”, its aggravation was preordained. Moreover, the newly formed People’s Republic of China, under Mao Zedong was also very much curious to distinguish itself as an epitome of the rising wave of Communism.
The United States in alliance with all the major European nations came up for the support of South Korea while PRC and the Soviet Union took place in war to fillip the North Korean side. The war was in itself a huge disaster. It was the first war in history to ever record full air combat between flying jets of the US and the USSR. The war observed death of around 5, 45,688 soldiers and left more than one million soldiers completely disabled from both the sides.
After the war, the North Korea was isolated out but still it managed to gain two friends from the “enemy of an enemy is a friend” policy of the Soviet Union and PRC. In 1950s only, USSR started assisting North Korea in the development of the latter’s nascent nuclear program. In 1969, for the first time the matter became a global issue after Chinese intelligence reports corroborated that North Korea was much near to being a nuclear-powered nation.
But soon, North Korea realized that being completely segregated out of the global processes and dealing with various impediments imposed on it after the Korean war, was not working fine; it again started its process of assimilating back into the mainstream. In 1947, the country joined IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) and allowed international agencies to look into its nuclear work. Moving ahead, in 1985, it even joined the NPT(Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty).
When everything was working exactly fine, suddenly a jolt came and things started being reversed. After developing Yongbyon nuclear reactor, a complete reversal in North Korea’s international policy took place. The uranium powered Yongbyon reactor, capable of producing weapon-grade plutonium, changed the complete outlook of the international political scenario in the Korean peninsula and subsequently in the year 1993 North Korea rescinded NPT, and refuted to get its nuclear supplies screened. After five years the US intelligence agencies reported about the covert development of advanced nuclear sites in North Korea. The matter finally became clear in the year 2002 when North Korea itself confessed having nuclear arms. The world was flabbergasted at the news since this remarked starting of an era of uncertainty in the Korean and South Chinese region. The bellicose attitude of North Korea and its floundering of international etiquettes as well as regulations triggered the commencement of six party talks including China, North Korea, the US, Russia, Japan and South Korea. Washington demanded complete dismantling of North Korea’s nuclear weapons but Pyongyang abjured conformity to any such demand. It officially walked out of the six-party talks in 2005 and the very next year, it underwent its first two nuclear tests with around 5 kilotons of explosive strength.
Since then, there has been no looking back. The aggressive attitude of North Korea aimed at subjugating the world through its continuous threats of attack as well as its clear belittling of international forums has done much in raising tensions all around the Korean peninsula. There has been no nation in the East that has remained unfazed by the illegit attempts of North Korea to attain hegemony over the whole region. And, hence this problem is of utmost gravity and needs to be dealt with much sensitivity.
Quick action will only lead to disasters and certainly the world is not at all ready for a nuclear war. No matter where the war takes place, it will just come as Hara-kiri to the humanity. The nightmares of Japan still continue to haunt the world and hence this situation needs to be tackled with supreme strategic fastidiousness and scrupulous management. Today we can’t manage to further procrastinate the matter. We can’t dare to adopt a dilatory attitude in this matter because if we don’t deal with it in the present, the world might not see a future.
Jai Hind, Jai Bharat
Jai Ma Bharti
No comments:
Post a Comment