Opinion: The US Forces The DPRK to Strengthen Its Nuclear Potential

The U.S. policy oriented toward strengthening sanctions and the international isolation of North Korea makes the nuclear safety on the Korean Peninsula and its nearest regions weaker, expert Alexander Vorontsov says.

The North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the strengthening of nuclear force a means of prevention of war against the United States. Politicians in Pyongyang think that Washington has been seriously preparing for the war, and for that reason they want to set up the anti-ballistic missile system THAAD in South Korea. The North Korean authorities stated that they are ready for the negotiation of the nuclear issue; however, they believe that the U.S. has inhibited the beginning of the dialogue by setting different preparatory conditions. The DPRK accused the U.S. of lying; recalling that Pyongyang proposed to Washington that it would decline martial exercises on the Korean Peninsula in exchange for North Korea’s waiver on nuclear-weapon tests, but the offer was rejected by the United States.

“Such statements by the North Korean MFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) were expected. The situation in the DPRK bothers its leadership a lot. And this is connected to the fact that all of their attempts to proceed with an informatory dialogue during the past year and a half have been ignored and declined; there have been numerous attempts aimed toward practically all of the concerned parties, such as Washington, Seoul and Tokyo,” said Alexander Vorontsov, head of the Department for Korean and Mongolian Studies and the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said on the air with Sputnik radio.

Additional evidence of aggressive U.S. intentions towards the DPRK, according to Vorontsov, was Barack Obama’s interview with YouTube producers in January.

“On January 22, he [Barack Obama] stated that the U.S. policy is all about forcing Pyongyang to collapse and become absorbed by Seoul. North Koreans say that the aggressive U.S. policy is not false. And under those conditions all of their peaceful means feel like a cover-up. The DPRK has nothing left but to concentrate on the defensive capacity, primarily, at nuclear deterrence strengthening. That is how it is called in Pyongyang,” noted the expert.

The U.S. also needs the demonizing of the DPRK to justify the anti-ballistic missile system’s set up in the region, he warrants.

“The THAAD system can shoot down missiles in open space on a very high and far trajectory. And such explanations about the system being aimed at the DPRK nuclear missile potential are not accepted by military experts. It is clear to the military that the system is aimed at the missile potentials of Russia and China. So the recent events happening around the DPRK bring a fair disturbance to Moscow and Beijing,” said the expert.

According to his opinion, the actions by the U.S. only increase the “nuclear pressure” on the Korean Peninsula.

“To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction. That is what is happening in reality. The pressure from the sanctions and the isolation forces the DPRK to boost work on growing its nuclear potential. The interdependence of these two tendencies—the increase of the sanctions and the increase of the DPRK’s nuclear potential—is obvious,” Vorontsov said.