North Korea Threatens War With South

Says All Ties With South Korea Severed Over Report on Ship

North Korea’s government is reacting with enormous hostility to a report last week from its neighbor to the south, a report which blamed them for the sinking of the Cheonan warship in March.

North Korea has insisted that the report is fabricated to falsely implicate them, and a spokesman today said that North Korea would sever all ties with South Korea and was abandoning “the agreement on non-aggression.”

South Korea’s own official statements on the sinking put it in something of a difficult position, as it angrily rejected reports that a North Korean torpedo was responsible at the time of the incident, only to eventually release a report claiming that was “obviously” what happened two months later.

But the Obama Administration has endorsed both South Korean positions and pledged its unequivocal support of the nation for whatever comes of the rising tensions, including the prospect of renewed fighting on the Korean Peninsula.

Though a half century under one of the most backwards governments on the planet has hardly stood the North Koreans in good stead for preparing the nation to fight the industrial juggernaut to its south, North Korea does have a limited nuclear arsenal, and with 28,500 US troops loitering along the border between the two the potential exists for an extremely ugly war.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.