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North Korea Warns Foreigners in South of Nuclear War North Korea Warns It Is on Brink of Nuclear War With South
(about 14 hours later)
SEOUL — North Korea warned on Tuesday that foreigners in South Korea should look for shelter or consider evacuating because the Korean Peninsula was on the brink of nuclear war. But the South Korean president, Park Geun-hye, said she remained determined not to succumb to the North's efforts to escalate tensions to extract concessions from the South. SEOUL, South Korea — As North Korea warned foreigners on Tuesday that they might want to leave South Korea because the peninsula was on the brink of nuclear war — a statement that analysts dismissed as hyperbole — the American commander in the Pacific expressed worries that the North’s young leader, Kim Jong-un, might not have left himself an easy exit to reduce tensions.
The North’s warning followed a similar advisory last week in which it told foreign embassies in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, to devise evacuation plans. “His father and his grandfather, as far as I can see, always figured into their provocation cycle an ‘off ramp,’ ” the commander, Adm. Samuel J. Locklear III, said during testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. “And it’s not clear to me that he has thought through how to get out of it. And so that’s what makes this scenario, I think, particularly challenging.”
“The situation on the Korean Peninsula is inching close to a thermonuclear war due to the evermore undisguised hostile actions of the United States and the South Korean puppet warmongers,” the Korea Asia-Pacific Peace Committee, a North Korean state agency, said in a statement on Tuesday. “It does not want to see foreigners in South Korea fall victim to the war.” The administration has settled on a strategy of refusing to make concessions to the North and has adopted a new plan to deter any hostilities by promising a proportionate response. In doing so, it hopes to reverse what is considers a long-term pattern in which the West offers aid to calm tensions and then North Korea breaks its promises to halt its nuclear program. But Obama administration officials acknowledge that the new strategy will work only if Mr. Kim either backs down or satisfies himself with a token show of force, like a missile test into the open ocean. The South Koreans have warned such a test could happen as early as this week.
In South Korea, where people have long grown used to a North Korean bluster or learned to shut themselves off from a situation out of their control, there were few if any signs of anxiety after the warning. The American Embassy in Seoul said that the State Department’s travel notice on South Korea remained unchanged on Tuesday. At the core of the concern within the administration and the intelligence agencies is that they do not understand Mr. Kim’s motivations. His father and grandfather suggested, at times, that they might be willing to negotiate to end their nuclear program. But Mr. Kim arrived in power with a small nuclear arsenal — the fuel for about six to a dozen weapons, according to intelligence officials, and a pathway to make more — and he may be calculating that with those potential weapons in hand, he is less vulnerable to attack.
“Despite current political tensions with North Korea there is no specific information to suggest there are imminent threats to U.S. citizens or facilities in the Republic of Korea,” said the travel message, which was last updated on Friday, using the official name of South Korea. “The embassy has not changed its security posture, and we have not recommended that U.S. citizens who reside in, or plan to visit, the Republic of Korea take special security precautions at this time.” “He may think he has more running room than the rest of the family did,” one administration official said this week, “and that can lead to miscalculation.”
The Korea Tourism Organization said the latest torrent of North Korean threats has so far had little effect on tourism, with the number of Chinese tourists doubling during a vacation week last week, said Lee Kwang-soo, a spokesman. Still, it was taking precautionary measures reaching out to foreign tourist agencies to inform them that it was safe to visit South Korea, he said. The United States’ harder line has also been adopted by the South’s conservative new president, Park Geun-hye, who parried the North’s latest threat on Tuesday by saying she remained determined not to succumb to what she said were efforts to escalate tensions.
“This is not the first time North Korea acts like this,” said Song Hyun-seok, an official at the South Korean office of the Philippine Department of Tourism. Gloria Lee, a spokeswoman at Lotte Hotel, one of South Korea’s biggest hotel chains, reported a 30 percent drop in Japanese guests this year but assigned the problem not to North Korea but to the weakening Japanese yen and fraying political ties between South Korea and Japan. “How long are we going to repeat this vicious cycle where the North Koreans create tensions and we give them compromises and aid?” she said at a cabinet meeting. The North’s latest warning carried the same ominous tone as the flood of threats since the United States led a successful effort to impose sanctions on Pyongyang for conducting its third nuclear test in February.
But DMZ Tour Corporation, a company that specializes in taking tourists to the heavily militarized border with North Korea to experience one of the world’s last reminders of cold-war tensions, has seen its business shrink in recent weeks. “The situation on the Korean Peninsula is inching close to a thermonuclear war due to the evermore undisguised hostile actions of the United States and the South Korean puppet warmongers,” the Korea Asia-Pacific Peace Committee, a North Korean state agency, said in a statement. The statement added that the North “does not want to see foreigners in South Korea fall victim to the war.”
“We have foreign tourists calling us to ask whether it’s safe to go to the border,” said Yoo Jae-sung, a company official who declined to reveal how many tourists his company lost to the tensions. “Yesterday, a group of Australian tourists had a vote among themselves after agreeing that if any one of them was afraid to go to the border, they would cancel the trip. They went.” Experts saw the new threat as part of what they have begun referring to as “psychological warfare,” meant to force concessions from Washington and Seoul. In recent days, analysts say, those threats have appeared designed specifically to cause jitters among businesses and investors in South Korea, perhaps reflecting a calculation that Ms. Park might be unable to stand as firm if her country’s already weakened economy is seriously threatened.
South Korean officials and analysts said North Korea was extremely unlikely to start a war. Rather, they said, its warning was psychological warfare aimed at heightening a sense of crisis to rattle investors’ confidence in the South’s globalized economy and force Washington and its allies to return to the negotiating table. In that vein, the North may launch a medium-range missile this week, they said. The North’s warning followed a similar advisory last week in which it told foreign embassies in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, to devise evacuation plans. And it came a day after the North said it was temporarily suspending operations at a joint North and South Korean industrial park; the South had previously assuaged investors’ fears about possible hostilities by saying the operations at the factories were continuing despite the North’s belligerent stance.
On Tuesday, Ms. Park rebutted North Korea’s escalating pressure tactics by vowing to break the pattern of rewarding North Korea for its bad behavior with compromises and economic assistance. In South Korea, where people are somewhat inured to North Korea’s bluster — or have at least learned to ignore a threat that is out of their control — there were no signs of panic on Tuesday. And the American Embassy in Seoul noted that the State Department’s travel notice about South Korea was unchanged and did not recommend any special precautions for United States citizens living in South Korea or planning to visit.
“How long are we going to repeat this vicious cycle where the North Koreans create tensions and we give them compromises and aid?” she told a Cabinet meeting called a day after the North pulled out all its 54,000 workers from the Kaesong industrial park, which is jointly run with the South. Still there were some signals of unease. Air Charter Service, a global company, said that since last week, it had received “growing interest” from corporations inquiring about evacuation contingency plans for their expatriate staff in South Korea in case the situation escalated further. Last week, General Motors said that further increases in tensions would prompt it to consider eventually moving production elsewhere. South Korea’s main stock index has dropped 65.71 points since a week ago Tuesday, although it crept up 2 points Tuesday to end the day’s trading at 1920.74.
The North Korean withdrawal of workers from Kaesong on Monday effectively shuttered the last remaining example of inter-Korean cooperation, one that had survived for eight years despite military tensions on the divided Korean Peninsula. North Korea said the Kaesong Industrial Complex, in the North Korean town of the same name, can reopen only when the South changed its “attitude.” The Korea Tourism Organization said the latest torrent of North Korean threats has so far had little effect on that industry, with the number of Chinese visitors doubling during a vacation period last week, according to Lee Kwang-soo, a spokesman for the group. Still, it was taking precautions, reaching out to foreign tourist agencies to inform them that it was safe to visit South Korea, he said.
“North Korea must stop its wrong behavior and make a right choice for the future of the Korean nation,” Ms. Park said, accusing the North of flouting inter-Korean agreements to protect investments. “If the North breaks international norms and promises like this, which country and which business will invest in the North?” But DMZ Tour Corporation, which specializes in taking tourists to the heavily militarized border with North Korea to experience one of the world’s last reminders of cold war tensions, said it had seen its business shrink in recent weeks.
Since it produced its first products in late 2004, the Kaesong factory park, just north of the western edge of the inter-Korean border, has shown how the two Koreas could use economic cooperation to overcome decades of political hostilities, signaling hope for an eventual reunification. The two Koreas breached their heavily armed border, clearing minefields and pushing back military encampments, to build a cross-border road and rail line that linked Kaesong and Seoul. Since then, hundreds of South Koreans and trucks had rumbled through a border crossing each day, shipping out textiles and other labor-intensive goods from 123 South Korean factories in Kaesong made with low-cost North Korean labor. “We have foreign tourists calling us to ask whether it’s safe to go to the border,” said Yoo Jae-sung, a company official who declined to reveal how many tourists his company had lost to the tensions. “Yesterday, a group of Australian tourists had a vote among themselves after agreeing that if any one of them was afraid to go to the border they would cancel the trip. They went.”
North Korea said it was forced to consider shutting down Kaesong because of tensions heightened by routine joint American-South Korean military exercises and United Nations sanctions imposed for its Feb. 12 nuclear test. In another sign of heightened worries, a prominent member of South Korea’s Parliament argued Tuesday in Washington that the time had come for the South to build its own nuclear weapons.
Analysts and officials here agreed that the young and relatively inexperienced North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, was exploiting the current situation to bolster his standing with the military, divert attention from domestic economic failures and make the outside world used to his country’s status as a nuclear weapons state. In an interview and a speech to the Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference, the lawmaker, Chung Mong-joon, a son of the Hyundai industrial group’s founder, said South Korea should withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and “match North Korea’s nuclear progress step by step while committing to stop if North Korea stops.”
North Korea’s ceaseless efforts to ratchet up tensions magnified the challenge faced by the new South Korean leader. “The only thing that kept the cold war cold was the mutual deterrence afforded by nuclear weapons,” Mr. Chung said.
Ms. Park, South Korea’s first female president, who has called the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher her role model, campaigned for her December election with a North Korea policy dubbed “trustpolitik.” His position is a fairly lonely one: President Park has not endorsed any effort to turn South Korea into a nuclear power.
In its essence, it copies Washington’s “strategic patience” approach: if the North wins the trust of the South and the United States — by de-escalating tensions and expressing a seriousness to negotiate away its nuclear weapons — it will get the dialogue, respect and economic assistance it desperately needs, but its provocations will be met only with more sanctions and isolation.

Choe Sang-hun reported from Seoul, and David E. Sanger from Washington. Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington.

As part of a trust-building process, she has offered to de-link humanitarian aid from political tensions. Her approach was seen as more flexible than her predecessor and fellow conservative, Lee Myung-bak. But it fell far short of the North Korean demand for the lifting of the trade embargo South Korea had imposed in 2010 when it blamed the North for the sinking of a South Korean Navy ship that killed 46 sailors. The North denied responsibility.
Ms. Park faces a delicate political balancing act in South Korea, where voters remain angry over the North’s recent provocations, including its artillery attack on a South Korean island in 2010, but also have grown weary of a prolonged political deadlock between the two Koreas under Mr. Lee.
On Tuesday, Ms. Park’s spokesman, Yoon Chang-jung, denied local media reports that the government has drawn up plans to shut down Kaesong.
“Our position remains unchanged that the Kaesong complex should remain in operation,” he said.