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N. Korea demands peace treaty for stopping nuke tests

January 15, 2016

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea said it could stop its nuclear tests in exchange for signing a peace treaty with the U.S. and a stop to annual military exercises between the U.S. and South Korea.

The North’s statement carried by the state media late Friday was a repeat of past offers that have been rejected by the U.S., which wants Pyongyang to commit to a complete abandonment of nuclear weapons.

An unnamed spokesman of the North’s Foreign Ministry called the purported hydrogen bomb test on Jan. 6 a justifiable move to ensure its survival against external threats.

“In response to the U.S. continuously invading our sovereignty and making threatening provocations, we will acquire ourselves with all possible nuclear attack and nuclear retaliation abilities, but will not thoughtlessly use our nuclear weapons ,” the official Korean Central News Agency quoted the spokesman as saying.

The spokesman also called the South’s decision to restart anti-Pyongyang propaganda broadcasts along their tense border an “odd” provocation.

The North is extremely sensitive to outside criticism of the authoritarian leadership of Kim Jong Un and has been retaliating to Seoul’s loudspeaker campaigns by flying thousands of propaganda leaflets across the border. Earlier in the week, South Korean troops fired 20 machine gun warning shots after a North Korean drone briefly crossed the border.

The North’s H-bomb claims have been met with widespread condemnation and suspicion, but also questions on how to stop the country’s growing nuclear threat.

The Korean Peninsula remains technically at war because the 1950-53 conflict ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty.

Pyongyang has called the annual U.S.-South Korean military drills a rehearsal for an invasion, though the allies have repeatedly said that the war games are defensive in nature.

One Comment

  1. David Hart

    January 16, 2016 at 1:34 AM

    This proposal sounds fair and reasonable. After all, contrary to what South Korea might want the history books to say, it was the US who abrogated the armistice in 1958 by introducing nuclear weapons onto the Korean peninsula, aimed at North Korea. The US constantly talks about regime change, since the North Korean regime does everything possible to resist the pull of US capitalism. Whenever the United States doesn’t get its own way, we usually find something to cause havoc and heartache for innocent people who don’t necessarily see things the way that the United States sees them. We hold yearly war game exercises with South Korean troops, predicated on regime change and simulating nuclear attacks. We sanction the country beyond any hope they might have of trying to improve their economy and helping their people. Yes, we do it all in the name of “freedom” and “democracy.” Meanwhile, South Korea is free to do whatever we tell them to do, and if they resist, well–let’s look at the long, sad list of former US client states who decided they had had enough–Chile, Honduras, El Salvador, Panama, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia–to name a few. It is way past time for both North and South Korea to embark on a path of reconciliation, which is needed well before any thought of reunification can be conceived. This is Korea’s problem, and they should attempt to solve it among themselves, after a formal peace treaty is signed by the US, China, the ROK and the DPRK–stipulating that there will be no movement toward regime change, and the US will eventually withdraw their military forces from the Korean peninsula.

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