Analysis: Why apocalypse won't be now:
Even though the fighting in Korea has all the elements needed to start the next world war - weapons of mass destruction, hostile superpowers, and a failing, nuclear-armed regime - it is improbable that apocalypse is around the corner in East Asia.
South Korea is one of the engines of Asian prosperity, on which the world's hopes of an early economic recovery rest on peace in the region. By attacking Yeonpyeong island, a target of no strategic value, North Korea's dysfunctional regime is telling the world how much pain it could inflict if it isn't bribed to behave itself. It hopes that its sabre rattling will force talks where the West will agree to an aid package in return for a guarantee that Pyongyang will not produce further nuclear weapons. Both sides want wealth, not world war three.
Like other weak but nuclear-armed states, North Korea believes it can use limited conventional-weapons aggression to secure its objectives, since its weapons guarantee it protection from large-scale retaliation that could threaten its existence. The first sign of North Korea's post-nuclear strategy emerged when it sank the South Korean naval corvette Cheonan in March.
The real fear now is that protracted North Korean aggression will push South Korea and Japan to reconsider their long-held taboo on possessing nuclear weapons.
Chang Kwan-Il, South Korea's defence minister, said on Monday that it had no immediate plans to request the U.S. to station tactical nuclear missiles on its soil, to bolster the 28,500 troops stationed there.
Tuesday's events will change that equation. The U.S., aware of hostile Chinese reaction, is unlikely to want to do so. If it refuses, though, its East Asian allies will begin to doubt its willingness to use its nuclear weapons if push comes to shove - and go it alone.
The advanced industrial capabilities of South Korea and Japan mean they are, for all practical purposes, a screwdriver's twist away from actually building one. In February, the U.S. Joint Forces Command admitted that both countries "could quickly build nuclear devices if they chose to do so". South Korea officially ended its nuclear weapons program in 1975, but the International Atomic Energy Agency recently discovered its scientists had continued to work on weapons production technologies.
Even though memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still inform public opinion in Japan, conservatives have long called for the country to develop nuclear capabilities. Last year, Shoichi Nakagawa, an influential politician, bluntly said that "it is nuclear that can counteract nuclear".
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