Pyongyang shot yesterday and a new card in the game of poker at high risk

Pyongyang shot yesterday and a new card in the game of poker at high risk. Two days after a nuclear test that has caused international concern, the regime announced that it would consider itself more related now by armistice agreements having put an end to the war between the two Koreas in 1953. Inter alia, it "ensures more legal status" of five South Korean islands located in sea yellow, where occurred in 2002 deadly military incidents. Pyongyang (whose nuclear Monday test would be four times more powerful than the one that it had conducted in September 2006, but whose power oscillate between 15 kilotons according to Moscow, the equivalent of Hiroshima, and 2 kilotonnes according to us experts), said acting in retaliation for the real "Declaration of war" that would be the membership, the eve of Seoul to the PSI (PSI) initiative. The PSI, to which 90 countries have joined, allows boarding in high sea vessels suspected of transporting nuclear material and other weapons of mass destruction.

New sanctions

The establishment of such control off the coast of Pyongyang since Monday the subject of an intense debate between analysts in the United States. His supporters believe that it would be the only effective option to prevent Pyongyang from building a nuclear arsenal probably rich already six bombs (not necessarily all operational), while its detractors argue that even if it is not a blockade, such a device would drive the Korea of the North to attack its neighbour to the South. Pyongyang, it is true, considers that any action or admonition against him is akin to a declaration of war, since that is why he had qualified the resolution of the UN Security Council which merely "regretted" his test of a long-range missile in April. The Security Council should vote in the coming days a new resolution that could provide, at the request of Washington and Paris, new sanctions to replace already raped resolutions. These sanctions would be however without effects on a largely autarkic regime, unless Beijing reduced or interrupted its deliveries of hydrocarbons. A little possible extent, Beijing is opposed to any "punishment" of Pyongyang, for fear that a destabilization of the country causing a huge influx of immigrants in Manchuria. Similarly, although concerned primarily with the threat of Pyongyang and having renounced the conciliatory policy for years, Seoul fears before a collapse of the North Korean regime, because he believes do not have the economic resources to a comparable to that in Germany reunification. China, like the Russia, can also be considered that the North Korean "troublemaker" is a useful subject of worry for the United States, to reduce the influence of Washington in the far East.

However, if the international community hesitates on the response to lead, Pyongyang, paradoxically, has reduced the options that remain for the attention of the new US administration and financial and diplomatic concessions in new non-verifiable commitments to renounce the nuclear exchange. After the nuclear test on Monday and the experimental firing of five short range missiles, it has more of many assets, apart from for example a clash with the South Korean Navy.