Today's short-range missile tests in North Korea compounded and confirmed what this weekend's nuclear tests re-announced: that the Communist country is pissed off at and about something which on the surface is as unclear as in its depths. US anti-proliferation and pre-emptive strikes, the South's out and up moves, domestic unrest due to economic problems and leadership questions top the list of potential prompts and causes, but do they in themselves explain the situation and propose a resolution?
How would North Korea actually benefit by attacking anyone with nuclear weapons, and knowing this be used to diffuse the hostilities? Few have addressed this pressing issue, and even fewer have discussed the possibility of this being a Cold War-style proxy war between the US and China, which would be fitting as the Korean War of 1950-53 was among the first to directly indirectly pit Communist and Capitalist forces. As we know, that war ended not in peace or victory but in a stalemate upon which the North/South divide on the Korean peninsula is based, and so all that's happening now. Post-war conditions, let alone post-war peace, were never implemented between the North and South and their backers.
This historical and contemporary fact points to a much broader context in which this North Korean nuclear affair and other threats to peace and security today must be understood and addressed. In the end, North Korea's nuclear weapons are geared not towards a particular enemy or purpose, but are a general and generally misguided response to a world still transitioning from the Cold War to a "something else" that remains vague and therefore potentially hostile. The Cold War is a current event creating a future which has not yet been imagined, let alone actualized.
