2016 is yet young: We’re hardly into February. But already it’s yielding a grim winter harvest of new dates that will go into future Korean history books, to be remembered and regretted.
Hitherto it was the North, negative as ever, that had made most of the running. On January 6 Pyongyang got the new year off to a bang with its fourth nuclear test, supposedly an H-bomb. A month later on February 7 they made it a double whammy, with a satellite launch – which, as everyone knows, doubles as a partial test of an inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM).
2016 is yet young: We’re hardly into February. But already it’s yielding a grim winter harvest of new dates that will go into future Korean history books, to be remembered and regretted.
Hitherto it was the North, negative as ever, that had made most of the running. On January 6 Pyongyang got the new year off to a bang with its fourth nuclear test, supposedly an H-bomb. A month later on February 7 they made it a double whammy, with a satellite launch – which, as everyone knows, doubles as a partial test of an inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM).
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Aidan Foster-Carter is Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Sociology and Modern Korea at Leeds University in England. Educated at Eton and Oxford, he taught sociology at the Universities of Hull, Dar es Salaam and Leeds from 1971 to 1997. Having followed Korean affairs since 1968, since 1997 he has been a full-time analyst and consultant on Korea: writing, lecturing and broadcasting for academic, business and policy audiences in the UK and worldwide.