North Korea has made available through their news-sources a picture of their leader Kim Jong Un signing orders while an ostensible – overly ostensible – map of the U.S. West Coast reads “U.S. Mainland Strike Plan.” Nothing like accidentally taking pictures of your war plans to intimidate your enemy. Or perhaps to bolster the hopes of your own people that you really do mean business in attacking the world’s number one superpower.
The composite of the pictures shows attacks on San Diego, Washington D.C., Hawaii, and, apparently, Austin. Un meanwhile is signing orders next to one his favorite possessions, as rumor would have it, his iMac.
“All the available technical evidence suggest that the North’s claims to be able to hit let alone target precisely geographical sites in the United States are highly implausible,” said John Swenson-Wright, senior lecturer in East Asian International Relations at the University of Cambridge, speaking to NK NEWS.
“It seems reasonable to suppose that the target map is designed for home consumption and to create and impression of war-readiness for DPRK-citizens that is part of a wider policy of strengthening national resolve,” and he also added that if the map was designed to show missile flight path, they would not be so straight.
What it amounts to, in other words, is a sort of rhetorical gesture in regards to the U.S. flying a couple B-2 bombers over South Korea recently.
Though it is unlikely North Korea could even hit Hawaii, South Korea is still a possible target. “No one wants there to be war on the Korean Peninsula, let me make that very clear,” said Pentagon Spokesman George Little to CNN. With the transition in leadership in South Korea, and with the saber-rattling tenacity of the North Korean’s, this could be a more dangerous situation than we’d like to see at this point.