US Can’t Offer Seoul Real Protection While Own Cities in Crosshairs of DPRK’s Nukes

US and South Korean officials have held inaugural talks of a new consultative group created to ease Seoul’s fears about North Korea’s nuclear capabilities. Veteran Asia Pacific affairs scholar Dr. Zhang Baohui says such talks are of limited utility so long as Washington can’t effectively protect even itself against Pyongyang’s nuclear-tipped ICBMs.

US and South Korean negotiators outlined a plan Tuesday providing fresh assurances from Washington that it would retaliate in the event of a North Korean nuclear strike against its South Korean allies.

Kim Yo-jong, deputy director of the Korean Worker’s Party’s Publicity and Information Department and sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, warned a day before the talks that the US's plans to further bolster its "extended deterrence" system to the Korean Peninsula "will only make the DPRK go further away from the negotiating table."

"The most appropriate way for ensuring peace and stability in the Korean Peninsula at present is to deter the US's highhanded and arbitrary practices from the position of strength and with enough exercise of power, rather than solving the problem with the gangster-like Americans in a 'friendly' manner," Kim said in a statement published by the Korean Central News Agency Monday.

"Today, 'denuclearization' is an outdated word to be found only in a dictionary of dead words," the official suggested, adding that Pyongyang will not fall for Washington's "old tricks" of a temporary freeze in US-South Korean drills, a pause in the deployment of US strategic assets in the region, or removing North Korea from Washington’s ‘state sponsors of terrorism’ listing in exchange for North Korean nuclearization.

Tuesday's meeting came amid the dramatic deterioration of relations between Pyongyang, Washington and Seoul which has occurred over the past two years after Presidents Trump and Moon left office, and were replaced by Biden and Yoon, whom North Korean officials and media have characterized as "rabid dogs," "shameless fools" and "stooges" over their hostile anti-Pyongyang rhetoric.

US Can’t Offer South Korea Real Protection

"I don't think this scheme will go very far or lead to any results that would substantially increase South Korea’s security," Dr. Zhang Baohui, director of the Center for Asian Pacific Studies at Hong Kong’s Lingnan University, told Sputnik when asked to comment on the new consultative group’s meeting.

Besides managing South Korea’s "nuclear anxiety," Zhang believes the group is designed to preempt Seoul and prevent it from potentially pursuing independent nuclear weapons capabilities, a step which would effectively "end…the world's nuclear non-proliferation mechanism" if it transpired.

"Hence, Washington has tried to soothe Seoul’s concerns by initiating token gestures of greater nuclear protection by the Untied States. However, due to North Korea’s increasing nuclear abilities to strike North America, Washington will unlikely adopt drastic measures like promising unconditional nuclear protection of South Korea or basing US tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea," the scholar said.

Zhang believes Tuesday’s talks will only further "sharpe[n] North Korea’s threat perception," thereby "worsen[ing] the security relationship between the two sides" and possibly resulting in a "permanent end to any denuclearization talks and more regular tests" of North Korean missiles. "Indeed, North Korea just tested its latest solid-fuel intercontinental missile last week," the academic said.

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) has dramatically expanded the range of its nuclear missiles in recent years, successfully testing a new ICBM in 2017 capable of hitting the entire continental United States, and improving its missiles' accuracy, payload and reliability in the years that followed.

North Korea published a new comprehensive nuclear doctrine last September in which it officially declared itself a nuclear power, and emphasized that it would only use its fearsome weapons to defend "the sovereignty, territorial integrity and fundamental interests of the state," prevent "a war in the Korean Peninsula and the Northeast Asian Region, and ensur[e] the strategic stability of the world."