North Korea threatens US after it helps South Korea

North Korea boasted Tuesday that the United States was “within the scope” of its long-range missiles after South Korea vowed to deploy new missiles capable of reaching anywhere inside the North.

North Korea’s National Defense Commission, the country’s most powerful ruling body, issued the threat in response to an agreement between the US and South Korea for the South to increase the striking distance of its missiles to 500 miles, nearly triple their current range. 

The North’s Korean Central News Agency quoted a spokesman as saying the North was ready to combat a “nuclear” attack by the US with “nuclear” weapons and to deploy “missiles against missiles.”

The question, however, is whether the furor over missiles – both South and North Korean – really marks another step on the way to a much more serious confrontation, including the risk of a second Korean War, or is simply another exercise in a long-running game of dare and double-dare.

“The North Koreans are trying to use their nuclear and missile programs as a panacea for their internal systemic problems,” says David Straub, a former senior diplomat in Seoul, South Korea, now associate director of the Korean studies program at Stanford University in California. “They want to reset the strategic chessboard and force South Korea, the United States, and others to deal on North Korean terms.”

By extending its own missile range, South Korea “answers that effort strategically," Mr. Straub says. 

South Korean officials pressured the US for years to revise an agreement limiting the range of their missiles before the US finally agreed. Under terms of the 2001 agreement, South Korean missiles could reach targets no farther away than 300 kilometers (186 miles).

As for North Korea, it has an assortment of short- and medium-range missiles and has tested a long-range Taepodong missile in August 1998 with a theoretical range as far as the US West Coast. That missile flew over Japan, landing in the western Pacific south of Vladivostok, Russia. North Korea has also twice tested long-range Taepodong missiles that plummeted into the sea shortly after takeoff – most recently two days before the massive celebration on April 15 marking the centennial of the birth of "Great Leader" Kim Il-sung, grandfather of the North's current leader, Kim Jong-un.

North Korea is assumed to be developing the capacity to attach warheads to missiles but is believed to be far from achieving that goal.

Rising confrontation

A sense of rising confrontation with North Korea, however, has added urgency to the whole issue of South Korean missile development. South Korean President Lee Myung-bak ordered defense officials to produce long-range missiles as quickly as possible at a cost of more than $2 billion. South Korea is expected to be able to deploy new model missiles within five years under terms of what South Korean officials call a “landmark” deal with the US.

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