The DPRK carried out its first hydrogen bomb test successfully on January 6 as part of its efforts to bolster up its self-defensive nuclear deterrent.

This is also the outcome of the DPRK’s decades-long exposure to the nuclear threat by the US.

US nuclear threat to the DPRK began during the Korean war (June 1950-July 1953).

On November 30 1950, the then US President Truman stated that the use of atomic bomb on the Korean front was under consideration and ordered the US strategic air force to stand by to fly bombers to the Far East to drop A-bombs. In December that year MacArthur, commander of the US’ Far East Command, declared they would set up a radioactive corridor in the northern part of Korea running from the East Sea to the West Sea and no living organism would revive in this area for 60 or 120 years.

At the time, aircraft loaded with nuclear bombs were on alert on a US aircraft carrier anchoring in the waters off Inchon.

Eisenhower, who was elected president in 1952, talked about precedence of action over negotiations, referring to the need to use A-bomb for a more practical action in Korea.

After ceasefire the US introduced large numbers of nuclear weapons into south Korea.

It scaled up the deployment of nuclear weapons steadily, thereby their number reached over 1 000 in the 1970s and over 1 720 in the 1990s.

To use them in a war against the DPRK, it staged ceaseless nuclear war rehearsals in and around south Korea.

Starting with the Focus Retina operation in 1969, the US-south Korea joint nuclear war games have continued for decades under different code names such as Freedom Bolt, Team Spirit, RSOI, Key Resolve, Foal Eagle and Ulji Freedom Guardian.

The DPRK put forward several proposals and made sincere efforts to remove the danger of nuclear war, but the US persisted in nuclear blackmail to serve its sinister purposes.

The Bush administration unilaterally scrapped the agreed framework the preceding Clinton administration adopted with the DPRK for the settlement of the Korean peninsula nuclear issue and went so far as to designate the DPRK as part of an “axis of evil” and listed it as a target of nuclear preemptive strike.

To cope with the US’ extreme nuclear threat, the DPRK took the decisive measure of completely withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003 and conducted a nuclear test for the first time in 2006, the second one in 2009 and the third in 2013.

The current Obama administration intensified nuclear blackmail instead of abandoning the policy hostile towards the DPRK. It magnified onslaughts on the country to stifle it in the fields of politics, military, economy, ideology and culture and human rights, with the result that the Korean peninsula was reduced to the world’s hottest spot and an ignition point of nuclear war.

The DPRK responded to the ever-increasing US nuclear intimidation with a drastic self-defensive measure: the first successful H-bomb test.

This is another manifestation of the DPRK’s stand that it will never discontinue nuclear development nor abandon its nukes as long as the US persists in its anti-DPRK policy and nuclear threat.

 

By

Kim Rye Yong

PT