A boat with 31 North Korea citizens drifted into South Korea waters and was picked up. North Korea being the kind of place that people sometimes don’t like going back to, four are trying to stay: North Korea on March 5 made a fresh demand for the repatriation of all 31 citizens whose boat drifted […]
Tag: south korea
Words, words, words: South Korea will swiftly and strongly respond with force until North Korea surrenders if the communist state launches another assault, the South’s new defence minister said.
My latest column at WPR involves Wikileaks and North Korea: Of course, the collapse of North Korea would require intense negotiations between all of the major regional actors, including Japan, Russia,
As has been noted in several places, this is one hell of an interesting cable. The upshot is that South Korean officials seem to believe that North Korea will collapse in a fairly short interval after the death of Kim Jong Il, and that a few Chinese policymakers have suggested that China is prepared to […]
I have an article up at TAP on the prospect for negotiations with North Korea: An agreement with North Korea could happen in two ways. First, the United States and its allies could pursue a “gra
Global Times: Dialogue through artillery fire is rarely an effective means to settle a dispute. Robert Gates: I don’t know the answer to any question about North Korea that begins with the word
I suspect that the crew of the Cheonan might dispute this headline from Reuters: North Korea shells South in fiercest attack in decades I suppose we run into definitional issues, and it’s true that the latest shelling has killed civilians. However, torpedoing a patrol ship without warning (even if the warship was in a disputed […]
This may in part explain why the South Korean Navy was twitchy and mysterious about determining the cause of the Cheonan sinking: The Navy corvette Cheonan was warned on the morning it sank on March 2
Minxin Pei thinks that the Pyongyang regime is unlikely to survive a transition from Kim Jong Il to his son. While the prospects for a collapse of the North Korean state are debatable, it’s unqu
See Geoff Forden on the typical damage profile of a modern torpedo, and how that relates to Cheonan.
Grover floats an idea: Now assuming that the incident was the product of centralized decision making rather than an unintended one ordered lower down the food chain (something I discussed earlier here
Cheonan was likely sunk by a mine or torpedo. I would be betting very heavily on “torpedo” at this point; no mine from the first Korean War has been discovered since 1986, and a new mine d