For now—and we should all cross our fingers in hopes it stays this way—there is only a war of words between the leaders of the United States and North Korea. This has all the juvenile resonance of playground bravado. Donald Trump refers to Kim Jong-un…
For now—and we should all cross our fingers in hopes it stays this way—there is only a war of words between the leaders of the United States and North Korea. This has all the juvenile resonance of playground bravado. Donald Trump refers to Kim Jong-un as a “madman” and a “rocketman on a suicide mission,” and he threatens to obliterate the entire nation of 26 million. Kim calls Trump “unfit to hold the prerogative of supreme command of a country” and describes him as “a rogue and a gangster fond of playing with fire.”
On Tuesday, North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho adds kindling when he labels Trump “mentally deranged and full of megalomania” and describes his insults of Kim an “irreversible mistake making it inevitable” that North Korean missiles will hit the U. S. mainland.
This crescendo of tough-guy talk makes it easy to imagine the guy on this side of the Pacific Ocean tweeting to the guys on the other side: “Go ahead, make my day!”
It’s not the words that give pause, however. If this duo were two guys in a bar calling each other rabid dogs and getting ready to crack heads with beer bottles, what would it matter? Thirty days in the slam for both of them and little harm done.
Words have a way of escalating, however. And the antagonists aren’t on the playground or a tavern. The weapons at hand aren’t dirt clods or empty bottles of brew. They’re city killers.
There was one small bit of good news today. North Korean authorities said that the 3.4 earthquake detected by China and other nations was natural and not the result of another underground test of Pyongyang’s nuclear capabilities as some observers had speculated after seismographs picked up the temblor.
Not that there is any reason to believe Kim plans to stop such tests. In fact, some experts hinted that the latest quake could be an aftershock of the one detected after the Sept. 3 nuclear test that North Korea claimed was triggered by the explosion of a hydrogen bomb.
