North Korea seems to be striving toward a nuclear state status like that held by Pakistan in order to use its nuclear arsenal as leverage to deal with superpowers, a South Korean professor said Friday.
"North Korea is dreaming to obtain the status enjoyed by Pakistan, which uses its nuclear arms as collateral to fight India, (Pakistan's far larger rival,") said Han Suk-hee, a professor at Yonsei University's Graduate School of International Studies, in a paper released before a local forum.
The forum was in the southern coastal city of Tongyeong and arranged by the National Unification Advisory Council, a presidential advisory committee on South Korea's unification policy.
The professor said South Korea needs to cooperate with other superpowers such as the U.S. and China in order to denuclearize the North.
In defiance of the international communities' ban on nuclear activities on North Korea, the country conducted its third nuclear test on Feb. 12, prompting the United Nations to further tighten punitive actions.
The country's official newspaper the Rodong Sinmun, published by the governing Workers' Party of Korea, reasserted its nuclear ambitions in its Thursday issue, drawing on what it said was the nuclear failure case of Libya.
"Countries that gave up armament efforts upon military pressures and conciliation from the U.S. ended up facing miserable fates," the newspaper said a day earlier, listing Libya as one example.
Libya's nuclear disarmament did not lead to the economic assistance that the U.S. had promised, the newspaper said. "The lesson from Libya's dismal case is that (North Korea) could protect its nation and sovereignty from the U.S. abuse of nuclear power only with its own nuclear deterrence," it said.
Amid tightening sanctions and U.S. pressure, Libya agreed in 2003 to give up the country's weapons of mass destruction and nuclear programs and implemented the agreement the next year. The government of leader Moammar Gadhafi fell in 2011.
In the same forum, Kyungnam University professor Kim Keun-sik said the ways to deal with the increasingly hostile North are getting more difficult. He said only two options are available, either the North gives in to U.S. sanctions and pressure or normalizes relations with the U.S. and opens up to the outside world.
"The North is now trying to shed light on instability of the Armistice Agreement (ending the 1950-53 Korean War) and justify (its intention) to discuss a peace treaty," Kim said, referring to the country's on-going warlike rhetoric and actions meant to escalate tensions on the Korean Peninsula. "The peninsula may have to put up with chronic tensions and the crisis of war."