North Korea has not fired a missile for 60 days, but that might have more to do with its own winter training cycle than with Pyongyang easing off on provocations.
Since North Korean leader Kim Jong-un took power, only five of the nation’s 85 rocket launches have taken place in the October-to-December quarter, according to the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies’ North Korea missile test database.
The Korean People’s Army regularly enters its training cycle every winter “and getting ready for it involves a calm before the storm,” said Van Jackson, a strategy fellow at the Center for Strategic Studies at Victoria University of Wellington.
“Fall is the harvest season and a lot of military labor is dedicated to agricultural output when not in war mode; inefficient, but it’s the nature of the North Korean system,” Jackson said. “It’s a routine, recurring pattern, which means we should expect a surge in provocations in the early months next year.”
Joseph Yun, the US’ top North Korean official, was reported by the Washington Post as saying on Oct. 30 that if the regime halted nuclear and missile testing for about 60 days, it would be the signal Washington needs to resume direct dialog with Pyongyang.
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Friday denied the US had any such window.
South Korea’s military on Monday said it is keeping its troops on full combat readiness, Yonhap News reported.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
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