Corea del Norte denunció hoy el envío por parte de Estados Unidos de dos bombarderos nucleares hasta su zona fronteriza en respuesta a su último ensayo de misiles, una acción que añade más tensión a la crisis que se vive en la región.



La agencia estatal norcoreana de noticias KCNA señaló que "una formación" de bombarderos estratégicos B-1B voló en la víspera desde la isla de Guam y llegó a aproximarse a unos 80 kilómetros de la ciudad costera surcoreana de Gangneung , cerca de la frontera con el Norte , donde se ensayó "un bombardeo nuclear".



Un portavoz del Ministerio de Defensa de Corea del Sur confirmó a Efe que bombarderos B-1B accedieron el lunes a espacio aéreo surcoreano, aunque no quiso precisar su número ni la zona geográfica donde fueron desplegados.



Por su parte, una fuente del Gobierno de Seúl detalló a la agencia Yonhap que dos B-1B arribaron a la zona mencionada por KCNA acompañados por cazas surcoreanos F-15K en torno a las 10.30 hora local (1.30 GMT) del lunes.



Ya que estos bombarderos tardan aproximadamente dos horas y media en llegar a Corea del Sur desde la base aérea Andersen en Guam, se deduce que la decisión de desplegarlos se tomó apenas un par de horas después de que Corea del Norte disparara un misil de corto alcance hacia las 5.39 hora surcoreana (20.39 GMT del domingo).



No es la primera vez que el Pentágono envía los B-1B a la península coreana (la última había sido el pasado 1 de mayo) como manera de exhibir músculo militar a modo de respuesta ante un ensayo de armas de destrucción masiva de Pyongyang.



En su artículo de KCNA, el régimen de Kim Jong-un consideró que el envío de los bombarderos constituye una "pataleta imprudente que sitúa a la península coreana al borde de la guerra" y acusó a Washington de querer atacar Corea del Norte con armas nucleares.



El texto concluye con la advertencia de que una guerra atómica en la península "desencadenaría un desastre que convertiría el territorio continental de EE.UU . en tierra chamuscada".



El ensayo de misiles del lunes es el noveno de Pyongyang en lo que va de año y el tercero en apenas tres semanas.



Los insistentes ensayos armamentísticos de Corea del Norte han llevado a un aumento de la tensión en la región y a una escalada verbal con el Gobierno del presidente estadounidense Donald Trump, que ha llegado a insinuar que estudia posibles ataques preventivos.



Detrás de buena parte de estos avances parecen estar tres figuras del régimen que hoy volvieron a aparecer en las fotos del Rodong Sinmun junto a Kim Jong-un: el experto en aeronáutica Kim Jong-sik, el jefe de desarrollo de armas Jang Chang-ha y el general retirado Ri Pyong-chol.

Foto: Istock

LO MÁS VISTO EN TERRA TV:





Terra</s>Pyongyang: North Korea on Tuesday accused the US of making a grave military provocation by sending a formation of B-1B nuclear strategic bombers to the Korean peninsula for a second time in weeks.

The formation flew over South Korea "once again to stage a nuclear bomb dropping drill" on Monday, Xinhua news agency reported.

"The formation of B-1B took off from Guam at the dawn of the day and flew over the 80 km of the east of Kangrung on the East Sea of Korea near the Military Demarcation Line," the report said.

"It frantically staged a joint drill making a precision strike against North Korea's major targets together with pursuit and assault planes on the nuclear aircraft carrier Carl Vinson, which is conducting a joint naval drill with the puppet navy on the East Sea of Korea," it said.

This was the second time for B-1B bombers to stage a nuclear bomb dropping drill in South Korea within several weeks, according to North Korean officials.</s>The military action "clearly proves that their talk about 'dialogue' is nothing but hypocrisy to disarm the DPRK and their wild ambition to eliminate the DPRK with nukes remains unchanged even a bit," the KCNA argued, using the acronym of the North's official name.</s>Pyongyang: North Korea on Tuesday accused the United States of making a grave military provocation by sending a formation of B-1B nuclear strategic bombers to the Korean peninsula for the second time in weeks.

The formation flew over South Korea "once again to stage a nuclear bomb dropping drill" on Monday, Xinhua News Agency reported.

"The formation of B-1B took off from Guam at the dawn of the day and flew over the 80 km of the east of Kangrung on the East Sea of Korea near the Military Demarcation Line," the report said.

"It frantically staged a joint drill making a precision strike against North Korea's major targets together with pursuit and assault planes on the nuclear aircraft carrier Carl Vinson, which is conducting a joint naval drill with the puppet navy on the East Sea of Korea," it said.

This was the second time for B-1B bombers to stage a nuclear bomb dropping drill in South Korea within several weeks, according to North Korean officials.</s>PYONGYANG: North Korea on Tuesday accused the US of making a grave military provocation by sending a formation of B-1B nuclear strategic bombers to the Korean peninsula for a second time in weeks.The formation flew over South Korea "once again to stage a nuclear bomb dropping drill" on Monday, Xinhua news agency reported."The formation of B-1B took off from Guam at the dawn of the day and flew over the 80 km of the east of Kangrung on the East Sea of Korea near the Military Demarcation Line," the report said."It frantically staged a joint drill making a precision strike against North Korea's major targets together with pursuit and assault planes on the nuclear aircraft carrier Carl Vinson, which is conducting a joint naval drill with the puppet navy on the East Sea of Korea," it said.This was the second time for B-1B bombers to stage a nuclear bomb dropping drill in South Korea within several weeks, according to North Korean officials.</s>SEOUL: South Korea said on Tuesday it had conducted a joint drill with a U.S. supersonic B-1B Lancer bomber after North Korea's state media earlier accused the United States of staging a drill to practise dropping nuclear bombs on the Korean peninsula.

Moon Sang-gyun, a spokesman for the South Korean defence ministry, said the exercise took place on Monday but declined to give further details.

Earlier on Tuesday, North Korea's state media said the B-1B bomber flew over South Korea to stage "a nuclear bomb dropping drill".</s>Reuters quoted Moon Sang-gyun, a spokesman for the South Korean defense ministry, as saying that a joint drill with a US supersonic B-1B Lancer bomber took place on Monday, but declined to give further details.

On late-Monday, North Korea's state media earlier accused the US of staging a drill to practice dropping nuclear bombs on the Korean peninsula.</s>Japan, separated by less than 1,000 km (625 miles) of water and a frequent target of North Korea's ire, is also in easy range of Pyongyang's short- and mid-range missiles.

In pure numbers, North Korea's military looks formidable, much larger than the more affluent South in both personnel and equipment. The North's 1.2 million soldiers face off against 640,000 South Korean troops who are backed up by 26,000 U.S. personnel stationed in the country.

However, Pyongyang's capabilities are not what the figures would suggest. Impoverished North Korea has all but abandoned running a conventional military that can engage in sustained battle because of scare resources and has instead focused on nuclear weapons and ballistic missile technology, experts said.

"A conventional military is very costly, and overwhelmingly so for North Korea. It quickly becomes a money fight and North Korea cannot win that," said Shin In-kyun, head of the Korea Defence Network, an alliance of defence experts based in Seoul.

Nevertheless, a defence policy statement from South Korea in December noted that North Korea's frontline artillery pieces could launch a "sudden and massive" barrage on the capital Seoul, a mere 50 km (31 miles) from the Demilitarised Zone border that separates the two Koreas.

North Korea has around 12,000 artillery guns, many arrayed near the border. It also has an arsenal of intermediate range missiles in operational deployment, some of which can travel more than 3,000 km (1,875 miles). That puts South Korea and Japan in range as well as the U.S. territory of Guam.

"They have the capability to strike anywhere in the South and Japan," said Shin.

North Korea has also shown it has submarine capabilities.

In 2010, a North Korean submarine was widely believed to have sunk a South Korean naval vessel, killing 46 sailors. Pyongyang has denied it was behind the attack. In the same year, North Korea shelled a South Korean island in a disputed area, killing civilians.

One military expert said the North might be careful before launching another blatant attack, given Seoul has vowed to respond vigorously next time.

"The greatest realistic threat from North Korea is a type of attack that will create maximum confusion in the South but one that will be confusing as to who instigated it so that it will not invite immediate retaliation on Pyongyang," said Song Young-keun, a retired Army general who was once head of the intelligence arm of the South's military, the Defense Security Command.

Cyber warfare or a possible attack on the intricate communication and utility networks in the South could have just as much impact as any outright military action, Song said.

Outside its artillery and missiles, North Korea struggles to match the South.

Many of the soldiers that make North Korea the world's most heavily militarised state are poorly trained or even properly fed and are deployed in hard labour or farming to supplement the meagre resources of their units.

The North's air force has more than 820 fighter jets, according to South Korea's Defence Ministry, but it does not have enough fuel to fly sorties or conduct needed drills to maintain combat effectiveness. South Korea has 460 jets.

North Korea has 4,200 tanks, according to South Korea, although Seoul's 2,400 are more modern and better maintained.

The question of North Korea's atomic capability was thrust to the headlines when Pyongyang on Thursday threatened the United States with a nuclear strike.

That came in the wake of accusations from Pyongyang that Washington was using military drills in South Korea as a launch pad for a nuclear war.

Experts say North Korea is years away from being able to hit continental America with a nuclear weapon despite a decades-long push toward an atomic capability.

The core of the North's unconventional military focus is a stockpile of fissile material that could be enough for six to eight nuclear weapons, and up to 5,000 tonnes of biological and chemical weapons that can wipe out a mid-size industrial city.

North Korea claims to have developed a miniaturised nuclear weapon while the launch of a long-range rocket in December that for the first time put an object into orbit indicated progress in its attempt to build an intercontinental nuclear missile.

"But for a weapons system to be viable, it has to be in production and deployed. I don't think we can say that about the Unha-3," Shin said, referring to the rocket launched on December 12.

Song said the general consensus was the North had yet to shrink a nuclear warhead to put on an intercontinental ballistic missile and more crucially there had been no tests to prove it has mastered the re-entry technology needed to bring a payload back into the atmosphere.

"It's hogwash, blackmail," Song said of Thursday's threat against the United States. (Editing by Dean Yates)</s>But while the latest threat to launch a "pre-emptive nuclear strike" on the United States is believed by experts to be beyond North Korea's technical capacities, and would be suicidal, history shows there can be bite behind Pyongyang's bark.

"This kind of extreme rhetoric has not been unusual for this regime, unfortunately," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said on Thursday, adding the United States could defend itself and allies Japan and South Korea in any event.

Asked if the deterrence talk meant that Washington sensed more than bombast, she added, "You have to take a government at its word when it makes these kinds of threats."

Thursday's threat, issued as a statement from North's Foreign Ministry spokesman, came during U.S.-led efforts to pass new U.N. sanctions on North Korea in response to its most recent nuclear test. The Security Council later approved the sanctions.

When it comes to actions welcomed by the United States and its allies, taking Pyongyang at its word is nearly impossible. Twenty years of nuclear diplomacy is littered with broken pledges, dashed deals and a small but growing North Korean nuclear arsenal.

South Korea, likewise, has little to show for hundreds of millions of dollars of aid it sent northward after Seoul and Pyongyang signed a raft of bilateral agreements at their historic June 2001 leaders' summit.

But when it comes to threats of bad behavior, North Korea has a better record of delivering - beginning with the three nuclear tests it carried out in 2006, 2009 and last month in the face of strong international warnings to desist.

The 2009 and 2013 tests defied U.N. sanctions forbidding such tests.

Bruce Klingner, a retired North Korea analyst for the CIA, said Pyongyang, through its Korea Central News Agency mouthpiece, often repeated threats "which are bombastic and seem to indicate impending military attacks that then don't occur."

South Koreans and their financial markets long ago learned to shrug off North Korea's most infamous and lurid threat, to turn Seoul into a "sea of fire."

This week's pre-emptive nuclear attack rhetoric appeared intended to intimidate South Korea, the United States and China, said experts and a U.S. official.

"A lot of it is just their classical reaction to the fact that the international community increasingly is coming together and making it tougher for them to operate - that's the kind of acting out that we often see from North Korea," Glyn Davies, U.S. special representative for North Korea, told a Senate hearing on Thursday.

If the North's aim was to goad Washington back into nuclear talks, it misfired, said Matt Stumpf, Washington director of the Asia Society.

"If North Korea is using new threats to get the United States back to the negotiating table, it is missing how much opinion in Washington, Seoul, Tokyo and Beijing has changed through successive crises," Stumpf said. "This might have been a workable strategy in the past, but there will be little appetite to negotiate until North Korea shows it is committed to real change."

A U.S. Congressional Research Service study published after last month's nuclear test cited intelligence estimates that North Korea had enough separated plutonium for at least half a dozen nuclear weapons.

Carrying out the threat to attack the United States, is not possible, however, without warhead miniaturization, which, the report said, "would likely require additional nuclear and missile tests."

Klingner, now at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, warned that "we cannot easily dismiss North Korean threats, because they have often been carried out."

He cited the example of 2010, when after threats against South Korea and vilification of its then-president, Lee Myung-bak, North Korea lashed out in a pair of deadly attacks on a South Korean warship and an island, killing 50 people. North Korea denied responsibility for the ship's sinking.

"The conundrum has always been: Is a new North Korean threat one that will not be carried out, as frequently has been the case in the past, or is it a portent of upcoming action?" said Klingner.</s>PYONGYANG, North Korea >> Early one winter morning, Kim Jong Un stood at a remote observation post overlooking a valley of rice paddies near the Chinese border.

The North Korean leader beamed with delight as he watched four extended range Scud missiles roar off their mobile launchers, comparing the sight to a team of acrobats performing in unison. Minutes later the projectiles splashed into the sea off the Japanese coast, 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from where he was standing.

It was an unprecedented event. North Korea had just run its first simulated nuclear attack on an American military base.

This scene from March 6, described in government propaganda, shows how the North’s seemingly crazy, suicidal nuclear program is neither crazy nor suicidal. Rather, this is North Korea’s very deliberate strategy to ensure the survival of its ruling regime.

Back in the days of Kim Il Sung, North Korea’s “eternal president” and Kim Jong Un’s grandfather, the ruling regime decided it needed two things to survive: reliable, long-range missiles and small, but potent, nuclear warheads. For a small and relatively poor country, that was, indeed, a distant and ambitious goal. But it detonated its first nuclear device on Oct. 9, 2006.

Today, North Korea is testing advanced ballistic missiles faster than ever — a record 24 last year and three in just the past month. With each missile and each nuclear device, it becomes a better equipped, better trained and better prepared adversary. Some experts believe it might be able to build a missile advanced enough to reach the United States’ mainland with a nuclear warhead in two to three years.

So forget, for the moment, how erratic Kim Jong Un and his generals may seem. North Korea conducted two nuclear tests last year; one was of the strongest nuclear device it has ever detonated and the other, Pyongyang claims, of its first H-bomb. The U.S. for its part is also escalating — in an explicit warning to Pyongyang, it successfully shot a target ICBM launched from a Pacific island out of the sky with a California-based interceptor missile on Tuesday.

The question is this: if war breaks out and North Korea launches a pre-emptive nuclear strike on an American military base in Japan — for real — would the U.S. recoil and retreat? Would it strike back, and risk losing Washington DC in a second wave of nuclear attacks?

For Pyongyang, forcing Washington to seriously weigh that calamity is a win. And it may become a real-world possibility on President Donald Trump’s watch.

The 7:36 a.m. launch on March 6 was conducted in North Pyongan Province near North Korea’s Sohae Satellite Launching Center. It sent the four Scuds into the ocean 300 to 350 kilometers (185 to 220 miles) from the coast of Japan.

Reporting on it the next day, North Korea’s Rodong Sinmun, the ruling party’s newspaper, stated it was not a test to see if the missiles would work, but rather a “drill” to train the troops who will “strike the bases of the U.S. imperialist aggressor forces in Japan in a contingency.”

To back that up, the North released several photos of Kim in a black overcoat holding a plastic pointer to a map laid out on a wooden table that showed the missiles’ flight path and other data. Analyst Jeffrey Lewis and his colleagues at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, quickly realized the Scuds were on a trajectory that, with a simple southerly tweak, would have sent them raining down on Marine Corps Air Station, Iwakuni.

Iwakuni, located 50 kilometers (30 miles) southwest of Hiroshima on the southern tip of Japan’s main island, is home to some 10,000 U.S. and Japanese personnel. It was used as a staging area during the 1950-53 Korean War, when it was called the “Gateway to Korea” by U.S. and U.N. forces, and continues to be one of the largest and most important U.S. military facilities in Japan.

Such an attack wouldn’t need to be nuclear to be effective. The deadly Sarin nerve agent or some other chemical weapon could also cause tremendous casualties. But training a nuclear attack on Iwakuni had a special psychological twist for those who follow the ceaseless military game of cat and mouse in the region. North Korea’s media stressed Kim was accompanied at the launch by nuclear weapons specialists.

“Before the Iwakuni simulation strike, U.S. and South Korean forces were conducting joint military drills, which involved F-35s based out of Iwakuni,” said analyst David Schmerler, who works with Lewis. “As the U.S. and South Korea were practicing their military drills in the event of a conflict on the peninsula, the North Koreans, in turn, practiced their strike plans.”

The U.S.-South Korea drills reportedly included an F-35 stealth fighter “decapitation strike” on Kim Jong Un and his top lieutenants.

Kim, apparently, was practicing how to take them out first.

WHY THIS COULD ALL GO NUCLEAR: THREE SCENARIOS

The Cold War concept of “mutually assured destruction” that kept the United States and the Soviet Union from attacking each other requires a “balance of terror” to encourage restraint: Once each side has attained a certain level of destructive power, neither will attack because they are convinced that neither will survive.

North Korea doesn’t have that assurance. If a war were to break out now, it could very well be destroyed. That’s the way things have been for decades.

But here’s where the urgency comes in for the United States and its allies. If North Korea succeeds in building nuclear-tipped ICBMs that can reach the U.S. mainland, the dynamic in a contingency would be highly volatile.

A nuclear-armed North Korea would have a strong incentive to go nuclear quickly and go nuclear first if it believed, correctly or not, that it was about to be attacked. But that also would increase Washington’s first-strike incentive, since it doesn’t want its strategic advantage taken away by a surprise attack on its own cities or military bases.

So both sides have good reason to be trigger happy.

Bruce Bennett, a leading North Korea expert and senior defense analyst with the RAND Corporation, offers these possible scenarios:

— Consider a case in which North Korea has a stockpile of nuclear warheads and the ability to launch them from submarines or remote, hard-to-detect sites on land. Fearing an attack from the U.S., it launches a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the South Korean port of Busan, then tells the United States that if there is any nuclear retaliation, it will fire nuclear weapons at U.S. cities.

Would Donald Trump, or whoever follows him, back away? Would he risk losing Los Angeles, or Chicago, to defend America’s allies?

— Or North Korea tries another ballistic missile launch like the one on March 6. This time, just before the missiles hit the water near Japan, a nuclear weapon on one or more of the missiles detonates, downing a few commercial aircraft or sinking some cargo ships. This would convince the world that Kim Jong Un has a real nuclear arsenal and isn’t shy about using it.

Would Trump react with a nuclear attack on North Korea?

— Now, picture war breaking out on the Korean Peninsula. North Korea, to convince the United States not to intervene, launches an ICBM that appears to be coming down short, well west of California. But on the way down it bursts in a nuclear explosion, possibly causing some damage to U.S. territory. Pyongyang then threatens more serious damage to the United States if there is any nuclear retaliation or U.S. intervention in the conflict.

Is the U.S. president going to risk millions of people dead and major cities destroyed?

“With the weight of history on his shoulders, how would a U.S. president respond?” Bennett asks. “How should he respond?”

It’s mid-morning on April 15, the “Day of the Sun,” the 105th anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s birth.

Some 100,000 North Koreans are amassed in Kim Il Sung square waving plastic bouquets and holding up lettered cards to create designs like the ruling party’s hammer, sickle and brush logo when seen from the balcony of the Grand People’s Study House. That’s where Kim Jong Un is standing.

Kim watches as military units from each branch of his million-man armed forces goose-step by in what North Koreans like to call “single-minded unity.” He then smiles and applauds at the most varied array of missiles and their transport vehicles the North has ever displayed.

The message of the parade, held before reporters from all over the world, is clear. North Korea is, or is near to being, able to launch a pre-emptive strike against a regional target. It is preparing to withstand a retaliatory follow-up attack if it does, and it is building the arsenal it needs to then launch a second wave of strikes, this time at the U.S. mainland.

Unlike the Soviet Union, North Korea can’t annihilate the United States. But if it can clear those three steps, it could conceivably destroy a major U.S. military base in the region or a city on the U.S. mainland.

This vision of a new “balance of terror” built to its crescendo as six submarine-launched “Pukguksong” missiles and their land-based cousin, the “Pukguksong 2,” rumbled through the square.

Submarines are the ultimate stealth weapon, mobile and notoriously hard to find. North Korea is believed to have one experimental ballistic missile submarine, and this missile would go in its silos. The Pukguksong 2, meanwhile, represents advances on the ground. It uses solid fuel, which means it can be stored and hidden, is ready for rapid launch and fits on a transport vehicle that can be deployed off-road in rough terrain. Kim Jong Un has ordered it be mass produced.

The big reveal came next.

No one really knew what it was until, in its first flight test a month later on May 14, it was sent an astounding 2,111 kilometers (about 1,240 miles) in altitude — higher than satellites in low Earth orbit. It remained airborne for 30 minutes before plunging to the Pacific. With great fanfare, the North’s media declared it the “perfect weapon system” capable of carrying a “large-size heavy nuclear warhead.”

Many analysts believe the missile — which the North calls “Hwasong 12” — could be a stepping stone to the ICBM North Korea needs to attack the U.S. mainland. Kim Jong Un was on hand for its early morning launch, too. He hugged his elated rocket scientists and, according to his official media, claimed he can now hit the United States with an “all-powerful means for retaliatory strike.”

That is bravado. For now. The missile’s estimated striking range is 4,500 kilometers (2,800 miles), give or take.

But, put another way, it’s halfway to Chicago.

Talmadge has been the AP’s Pyongyang bureau chief since 2013.
A formation of United States B-1B bombers from Guam flew over Korea, staging a nuclear bomb dropping drill. North Korea calls it a military provocation.