North Korea's threats over US-South Korea war games: Another bluff?

A flotilla of 20 American and South Korean Navy ships churned the waters off South Korea’s east coast Sunday on the first of four days of military exercises in a show of force that North Korea promises to answer with a “powerful nuclear deterrence.”

The rhetoric from North Korea, however, appears to most observers as just that – words that suggest a long-range determination to stick to its nuclear program while avoiding an immediate military confrontation.

“This is just a verbal threat,” says Choi Jin-wook, senior fellow on North Korean issues at the Korea Institute of National Unification, a Seoul-based think tank. “It’s just a bluff.”

What the war games entail

The military exercises, led by the 98,000-ton Nimitz class aircraft carrier, come in the aftermath of the sinking of the South Korean Navy vessel, the Cheonan – in the Yellow Sea, on the opposite side of the Korean peninsula – in March. The carrier has 80 war planes taking off from its decks while more than 100 other planes are flying from the major United States air base at Osan, about 30 miles South of Seoul. The exercises, called “Invincible Spirit,” also include destroyers with Aegis-class counter-missile systems – the latest technology for fending off missiles of the sort that North Korea has tested over the years.

The emphasis is on antisubmarine warfare with ships and planes looking for dummy targets similar to the midget submarine that an investigation, led by South Korea and including experts from the US, Britain, Australia, and Sweden, concluded had fired the torpedo that split the Cheonan in two. North Korea continues to deny any role in the attack, in which 46 sailors were killed, but has said it wants to talk about it with investigators.

What does North Korea want?

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