China: U.S./South Korea War Exercises Push North Korea To Keep Nuclear Weapons Program

PRESS RELEASE

China: U.S./South Korea War Exercises Push North Korea To Keep Nuclear Weapons Program

March 14, 2017 (EIRNS)—Global Times, the Chinese Communist Party's newspaper, in an unsigned editorial today, condemns both the North Korean nuclear weapon development program and the ongoing U.S.-South Korean military exercises, which are explicitly testing means for a preemptive strike on North Korea.

"‘To decapitate the North Korean leadership’, and to punish ‘the South’s imperialist running dogs, with nuclear weapons,’ are both the craziest threat Pyongyang and Seoul have sent to each other. They are equally hysterical, expressing both sides’ viciousness to destroy the other,"

the editorial states.

But they point to the stupidity of the U.S. policy:

"How can Pyongyang remain indifferent facing a military exercise that includes more than 300,000 military personnel to carry out missions targeting its war command and top leader?... They intend to scare Pyongyang, but the actual effect is the opposite. Instead, Pyongyang believes that nuclear weapons are the reason why Washington and Seoul dare not put their plan of subverting the North’s regime into practice."

They also point to the increased threat to China from the massive U.S. military deployments:

"Through joint drills, more and more U.S. strategic weapons are deployed on the Peninsula, posing a greater potential threat to China.... [I]t disregards China’s security concern, it may even feel schadenfreude [joy in another’s misery]. To the Chinese people, the South Korean government has lost its rationality on the security issue. The U.S. is here to stir up more trouble in Northeast Asia. By hitching itself to the U.S. chariot, South Korea naively thinks it shares a common destiny with the U.S. However, if war breaks out, the battlefield is bound to be the Korean Peninsula, while the U.S. is on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. South Korea and North Korea are the two who really share a common destiny."

The "Key Resolve and Foal Eagle 2017" annual U.S.-South Korea exercises are the largest ever this year, including practice invasions of North Korea. The U.S. Special Missions Units responsible for the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, including SEAL Team Six, are included in the exercise.

Other hardware: the U.S.S. Carl Vinson aircraft carrier and its strike group of two guided-missile destroyers and a guided-missile cruiser; F-35B stealth fighters from Japan to the Korean Peninsula for the first time; nuclear-capable strategic bombers, such as B-52s and B-1Bs; Gray Eagle drones, equipped with Hellfire missiles, which will remain in South Korea for the first time; and, of course, the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missiles, which have now arrived.

Japan has also joined with the U.S. and South Korea in an anti-missile exercise off the North Korean coast, for an exercise beginning today.