Why People’s Korea needs a strong defense

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has a right to respond to U.S. imperialism’s attempts to encircle it militarily and strangle it economically. That is why it has added nuclear weapons to its strong armed forces, as deterrents to Washington’s adventurism.

The DPRK is not belligerent. The country is defending itself from the most belligerent power the world has ever seen. The U.S. has military bases all over the world — over 1,000. Since 1945, the U.S. has produced 70,000 nuclear warheads, and is the only country to have used such horrific weapons — incinerating more than 200,000 people in August 1945 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in just two days.

The DPRK has no foreign bases. Its military posture is totally defensive. But the government has warned repeatedly in recent days that it would use nuclear weapons if attacked by the U.S.

Beginning March 7, the U.S. has been threatening the DPRK with the largest joint military exercises ever, “not only in number of troops, but in terms of equipment, supplies and weapons,” says a military official of the puppet south Korean regime. (The Korea Herald, March 8)

Called “Key Resolve” and “Foal Eagle 16,” these large mobilizations on DPRK borders are carrying out the Pentagon’s OPLAN 5015, “a classified war plan signed last year that includes surgical strikes against North Korea’s nuclear, missile and command and control facilities. It also specifically calls for ‘decapitation’ raids by Special Forces to neutralize North Korea’s senior leadership.” (thediplomat.com, March 8) Some 17,000 U.S. and 300,000 south Korean puppet troops are participating in these war “games.”

Faced with such reckless hostility from the world’s biggest nuclear power, the leaders of the DPRK would be derelict in their duty if they did NOT take strong measures to defend the people of their country and their socialist system.

It is the height of shame that Russia and China recently voted with the three other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council — the U.S., Britain and France — to impose greater economic sanctions on the DPRK because it had tested missiles. Are memories really that short? Both the Soviet Union (now Russia) and China had to resist enormous threats from these three nuclear-armed imperialists in order to develop their own defensive weapons.

You see, at first only the imperialist victors in World War II — the ones that exploited the labor of half the world’s people through colonialism and neocolonialism — were allowed into the nuclear club. If countries like the Soviet Union and later People’s China were to defend themselves in the virulently anti-communist Cold War that followed the world war, they needed a nuclear deterrent. It cost them dearly, but they paid the price in order to safeguard their independence.

U.S. attempts to undermine and overthrow the government of the Workers’ Party of Korea will fail. After nearly 70 years of having to defend themselves from the Pentagon, which has occupied the southern half of the Korean Peninsula since the final days of World War II, the Korean socialists in the North will not be deterred from defending their sovereign right to employ whatever weapons will keep them free from foreign domination.

Before the U.S. moved in its troops in 1945, all of Korea had suffered through 35 years of Japanese colonial rule. The revolutionaries who liberated the North from Japan, and then from 1950 to 1953 fought off a massive attempt by the U.S. to resubjugate them, have vowed never to allow such a crime to happen again to their country.