At the North Korean embassy in London, they were answering the phone but saying little. In fact, the world, well beyond Asia, is perplexed by the mysteries of the nuclear-capable state’s bellicosity and many fear mutual ignorance could help turn words into acts of war.
You have two new governments in North and South Korea that are still finding out where each other’s red lines are
Many foreign analysts offer reassurance. No one, they say, really wants war.
Missile and nuclear tests, threats of possible atomic strikes on the US and military drills on both sides of the divided Korean peninsula, reflect rather a youthful North Korean leader and newly elected South Korean Government both finding their feet at home and testing their strengths.
Yet neither 30-year-old Kim Jong-un, who succeeded his late father just over a year ago, nor South Korea’s President Park Geun-hye is seen having much room or appetite to back down. The risk of miscalculation or mistake sparking accidental conflict may be growing by the day – bringing with it the greatest risk in years of a regional nuclear exchange.
“We have had worrying times before, but this is bad,” says Victor Cha, former director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council under President George W. Bush.
“The rhetoric is off the charts. We don’t understand this new guy at all,” added Cha, who is now a senior adviser at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
“There are number of ways this could go very wrong,” says Ken Gause, chief North Korea specialist at the Centre for Naval Analyses, a US Government-funded research institute that advises the US military among others.
“You have two new governments in North and South Korea that are still finding out where each other’s red lines are.”
While there is uncertainty over whether North Korea is capable of firing a nuclear device across the border or over the sea at Japan or US Pacific bases, even a conventional conflict could be devastating.
Meanwhile, the risk of confrontation with Pyongyang’s traditional ally China also worries Washington.
The likely human and economic cost, those with knowledge of events say, was one of the key reasons Washington held back from direct military action against the North Korean nuclear programme in the 1990s to stop it completing a nuclear device.
The bottom line, veteran North Korea watchers say, is that the outside world still has little real understanding of what is happening in the secretive authoritarian state.
Satellites and spies may provide basic details of weaponry, but the intentions of those at the top remained very opaque.
“It is basically guesswork,” said Mark Fitzpatrick, a one-time North Korea specialist at the US State Department and later deputy head of its nuclear non-proliferation team.
“China and Russia may have a better understanding than us, but I don’t believe anyone is truly on top of it,” added Fitzpatrick, now a senior analyst at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies.
How much the North – and Kim Jong-un in particular – understands events outside its borders is also far from clear.
The London embassy – housed in a modest villa in the suburb of Ealing – is one of only a few overseas missions run by the administration in Pyongyang. Direct contact with foreigners is rare and many senior leaders have never left the country.
South Korea is also preparing militarily. After criticism at home for muted responses to the sinking of one of its warships in 2010 and fatal shelling of an island in 2011, the Government in Seoul has ramped up its readiness in case of attack.
Even an accidental incident on either side, analysts now worry, could spark dramatic and almost instantaneous escalation.
Much larger than normal, this year’s annual US exercises show Washington reassuring its South Korean and Japanese allies that it stands behind them. But the public deployment of US firepower, including B-52 and B-2 bombers, risks provoking reaction from the untried new Kim in Pyongyang.