DPR Korea will not be cowed

by our Asia Affairs correspondent 

ANGLO-AMERICAN imperialism stepped up its threats against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea this week following the successful firing of a DPRK missile that flew over Japan before falling into the Pacific Ocean as planned. US President Donald Trump warned that “all options are on the table” while Theresa May refused to rule out future British military action against the DPRK when asked by the media on the eve of her talks with the Japanese government in Tokyo.

Meanwhile the US imperialists have been carrying out atomic weapon tests of their own. This week the US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced the successful flight tests of its B61-12 gravity nuclear bombs operating in a non-nuclear assembly. The NNSA say the tests were carried out to check the “aircraft’s capability to deliver the weapon” and it coincides with reports that some US senators are pushing Trump to withdraw from the 1987 INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union to eliminate cruise and short-range ballistic missiles,

The renewed testing of the DPRK deterrent was the legitimate response to the start of new US military exercises in the occupied south of the Korean peninsula, which simulate an invasion of Democratic Korea. It was also clearly intended as a warning to Japan, the weakest imperialist country in the world and little more than an American vassal, of the consequences of slavishly supporting US aggression in Korea.

Though the DPRK has fired missiles over Japan in the past the two previous occasions, in 1998 and 2009, they were to launch satellites. This time Japan activated its public early warning system and reactionary Japanese premier Shinzo Abe called the test an “unprecedented and a grave threat”.

But the fact is that Democratic Korea had not broken any international law by conducting the test as the missile flew above the main atmosphere. There is nothing to prohibit extra-atmospheric overflight of sovereign territory. Sovereignty does not extend beyond the atmosphere.

At the United Nations the 15-strong Security Council, which includes People’s China and the Russian Federation, unanimously condemned Monday’s missile test and called for the immediate end of “such “outrageous actions”.

But the Chinese repeated their call for the Americans and their south Korean puppets to halt their military exercises and remove the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) missile system from south Korea in exchange for the DPRK’s halt of missile and nuclear weapon tests. Russia supports this “double freeze” proposal but it has been dismissed out of hand in Washington.

Trump began threatening north Korea as soon as he stepped into the White House demanding that the DPRK abandon its nuclear deterrent while offering nothing in return. In August the Americans forced the UN Security Council to rubber-stamp more sanctions while Trump raged that Democratic Korea would face “fire and fury ... the likes of which the world has never seen” if it did not do the bidding of US imperialism.

But in the DPRK everyone knows the fate of countries like Libya and Iraq, which disarmed under the mistaken belief that this would spare them from the horrors of imperialist invasion and regime change. No one in the DPRK takes any takes any notice of threats coming from the imperialists who devastated the country in an attempt to overthrow the people’s government during the Korea War.

The DPRK has been under American sanctions of one form or another since the end of the Korean War in 1953. But despite unrelenting hostility from US imperialism and its regional lackeys, Democratic Korea has continued to advance along the road of socialist construction.

The United States should reconsider its aggressive stance and know that no economic pressure, threat or blackmail will overthrow the Democratic People’’s Republic of Korea, said an editorial in Rodong Sinmun (Daily Worker), the voice of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea.

The DPRK’s self-defence measures continue, among them the development of nuclear abilities, while Washington, in collusion with south Korea and Japan, carries out military exercises off the coasts near Democratic Korea.

“Our country does not belong to the category of those that are frightened or subjugated to the pretensions of the White House” the Korean communist daily said.

“Our position is unchanged that as long as the hostile policy and nuclear threat of the United States against DPRK is not radically eliminated, we will never put the nuclear deterrent at the negotiating table, or will step back from the road to bolster up the nuclear armed forces.”