North Korea: how scared should we be?

Okay, so how scared should we be by North Korea’s nuclear brinksmanship?

On the face of it, it’s not looking good. First, there’s the (still unconfirmed) nuclear test detonation on Sunday, followed by five short-range missile launches on Monday and Tuesday. And today, reports that North Korea may have restarted its Yongbyon plant which makes weapons-grade plutonium.

Then there’s the shrill rhetoric: the headlines of the party paper screaming that “We are fully ready for battle,” the announcement that Pyongyang’s abandoning it’s 56-year truce with the South – and also this morning, the threat of “a powerful military strike” if its ships are stopped and searched.

We’ve heard most of this before, following condemnation of the North’s first nuclear test three years ago… but, completely unfazed by the world’s latest round of condemnations, the North Korean military is now warning that it no longer feels bound by the terms of the 1953 ceasefire. This escalates things to a new level.

“If the rhetoric goes on rising, the danger is they will run out of words and threats and start doing deeds,” Aidan Foster-Carter, Britain’s foremost Korea-watcher, has just told me over the phone. Hmmm.

“It’s quite dangerous and quite worrying,” agrees Jiyoung Song, a political scientist at Cambridge.

So if the experts are scared, what of ordinary South Koreans, whose capital, Seoul, is only 40 miles from the frontier, where two million troops face off. Ten million people live in the city, in the shadow of the Kim Jong-il regime’s threats to turn their city into a “sea of fire.”

I was struck by interviews that have been done on the streets of Seoul: people seem so stoic. “I’ve got accustomed to it,” 24-year-old Cha Ji-Hyon told Reuters. “When I heard the news, I said to myself ‘I see they did it again’ and I didn’t worry about it. I don’t expect any war. I do not have to run away.”

Other South Koreans are clearly scared – and you can’t blame them, as North Korea’s conventional forces are so terrifyingly huge that its artillery alone would probably make short order of flattening Seoul. No one even knows whether the North is actually capable of attaching its nuclear weapons to missiles. Probably safer at this stage to assume that it can.

The Chinese are scared too. But not so much of nuclear annihilation as they are of the chaos that would ensue should the Kim regime collapse.

For Beijing, regional stability is everything. It fears a flood of refugees from a country of 23 million people whose increasingly frail-looking maverick ruler spends what little money the country earns on nukes, and not food. Their answer then? Prop him up, calm things down.

The Americans are scared for a different reason. They worry more about North Korea selling its nuclear know-how, or even its nuclear material, on the black market. Hence all the talk of the proliferation security initiative at the moment.

South Korea joined the US-inspired PSI yesterday. It means they can interdict ships suspected of carrying weapons of mass destruction. This, North Korea declared, was tantamount to a declaration of war, triggering all today’s threats.

So now it’s up to the UN Security Council, whose members are scared for all sorts of different reasons, to defuse this crisis. It doesn’t have that many options that haven’t already been tried; hawks and doves have all failed.

Probably the best the world can hope for is that this bellicose rhetoric is just North Korea’s rather crude way of saying: “Back off. We have a succession problem. If you don’t let us just sort it out, we really will go nuclear.”

The trouble is, all you read will just be informed guesswork because the truth is, this regime is so secretive and its policies so opaque and so unpredictable, that, well, it’s impossible to predict where it will go next.

And if that makes it hard for journalists, spare a thought for President Obama’s advisors in the Pentagon.