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Opinion | The missile threat the world needs to worry about is not from North Korea, but Russia and Japan
- For all its tests, North Korea can’t risk firing missiles for real. However, the US has made the world a more dangerous place by killing a missile treaty with Russia and intending to deploy more missiles in Asia
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Why you can trust SCMP
So much has been said and written about North Korea’s missile tests that it’s possible to forget they are hardly the most dangerous threats posed by flying projectiles.
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That’s not to minimise their importance, or to agree with the assessment of US President Donald Trump, who last Friday downplayed Pyongyang’s recent missile tests as “short-range”, not in violation of anything, and praised North Korean leader Kim Jong-un for apologising for the tests in another beautiful letter. Hours later, Pyongyang carried out another set of tests.
There are two points here. First, we have a lot more to fear from Russia’s burgeoning missile ambitions, and China’s too, than from North Korea’s. Second, North Korea is basically throwing its direly needed resources away on nukes and missiles, whatever the range, when Kim is nowhere close to having warheads affixed and fired for real.
Significantly, the Russian danger has increased with Trump’s decision to jettison the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. The agreement, which banned Russia and the US from making land-based missiles with ranges from 500km to 5,500km, was reached by US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev 31 years ago.
Trump’s advisers, notably John Bolton, convinced him the Russians had been violating the treaty all along, making new missiles while making a show of dismantling old ones, while the Chinese, not bound by any treaty, were making many more.
With the INF relegated to the trash heap of history this month, everyone’s going to be making more missiles than ever. The US is looking around for bases in Asia to field missiles, while Russia is adding to the bases it has between the Russian Far East – which is so close to Alaska – and its border with the eastern European countries which used to be satellites of the Soviet Union until it collapsed soon after the INF took effect.
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