In the Shadow of North Korean Threats, South Korea Shrugs

[Time]

Nobody does bluster better than Pyongyang. In the past few weeks the country's hardworking propagandists declared a "state of war" with South Korea, announced plans to restart a plutonium-producing reactor and threatened the U.S. with nuclear Armageddon. A North Korean spokesman found the time to decry the "venomous swish" of the South Korean President's skirt. And dictator Kim Jong Un reportedly urged frontline troops to "break the waists of the crazy enemies, totally cut their windpipes and thus clearly show them what a real war is like." Fighting words, sure, but nothing entirely new here. For decades Pyongyang has promised to reduce the Republic of Korea to a "sea of fire," using regular rounds of escalation to secure concessions from the outside world. Last week, as part of an almost daily barrage of threats, North Korea warned that it could not secure the safety of diplomats in the capital beyond April 10 and advised foreigners to evacuate Seoul. But Wednesday came and went, the diplomatic corps stayed put, and Seoul shrugged off the warning, more aggravated, it seemed, than genuinely anxious. "North Korea is using provocation because it has worked in the past," Cho Han-bum, a senior researcher at the Korea Institute for National Unification tells TIME. "North Korea is not preparing for war." (MORE: China's Long, Fruitless History of Irritation With North Korea) Tell that to the Americans. One of the strangest things about the current crisis is that it seems like the farther you get from the Korean Peninsula, the greater the level of fear. For weeks now the international press has been warning of "imminent" war, a claim unhelpfully bolstered by the likes of Vladimir Putin, who predicted that conflict with North Korea could make Chernobyl look "like a child's fairy tale." Chuck Hagel, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, was less colorful, but equally urgent, saying North Korea constitutes "clear and real" danger to the U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is due to fly into Seoul for talks this week. Perhaps unsurprisingly, findings released on Tuesday by the Pew Research

Via: TIME GlobalSpin