In its latest attempt to raise war fever on the peninsula, North Korea has asked foreign embassy personnel to consider evacuating. But the North’s overheated rhetoric is obscuring a real threat posed by its nuclear and missile potential. Its nuclear test on February 12 showed it is on the way to perfecting a compact weapon [...]

BERLIN – The world’s task in addressing North Korea’s saber rattling is made no easier by the fact that it confronts an impoverished and effectively defeated country. On the contrary, it is in such circumstances that calm foresight is most necessary. The genius of the Habsburg Empire’s Prince Klemens von Metternich in framing a new [...]

In English slang, “pickle” means a bad situation or a state of disorder. The provenance is Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” And pickle well applies to the nuclear ambitions of North Korea, Iran and U.S. policy. Last week, Pyongyang announced it had exploded a nuclear device measuring about 10 kilotons, smaller than the bombs that fell on [...]

TOKYO – The Unha-3 rocket launched from Sohae in North Korea on the morning of December 12 passed through Japanese air space over the island of Okinawa 12 minutes later, and crashed into the Pacific Ocean roughly 300 kilometers east of the Philippines. The launch could be considered a mild surprise, because South Korean intelligence [...]

Russia recently held the largest nuclear weapons exercise in its history, matching, for the first time in over two decades, the scale of Soviet-era tests. Russian President Vladimir Putin presided over a combined exercise of all three components of Russia’s nuclear triad (submarine-based missiles, land-based missiles, and bombers), taking “personal leadership” of the endeavor, according [...]