If North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un’s threats to start a nuclear war are an attempt to get the world’s attention, he’s succeeded.

The question is why?

The answer would go a long way to determining whether war cries emanating from North Korea herald a devastating conflict or, as many analysts say, are just the latest round of provoke- and-retreat behavior driven by the leadership politics in Pyongyang, North Korea’s isolated capital.

Even bluster carries risks of misjudgments or accidents if Kim, no older than 30 and new to power after his father’s December 2011 death, isn’t skillful at managing the crisis he’s created with missile and nuclear tests, threats against South Korea, and videos depicting attacks on the U.S.

“What I fear most of all is that he does not have an ‘off ramp’ to be able to ratchet back the tensions,” David Maxwell, associate director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, said in an e-mail.

Kim has rattled nerves by declaring North Korea’s withdrawal from the 1953 armistice that ended Korean War combat, cutting military hot lines with the South, ordering rocket forces on alert, and threatening strikes.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said the U.S. has seen no troop movements or other changes in the North’s military posture to back up its threats. Still, he said, the U.S. takes Kim’s threats “very seriously.”

Kim is following the same “six-decade-old playbook” used by his grandfather, Kim Il-sung, and late father, Kim Jong-il, raising tensions in an effort to split the U.S.-South Korean alliance and to win political and economic concessions, said Maxwell, a retired Army special forces colonel who spent time stationed in South Korea.

The North also has a record of stoking tensions at times of transition in South Korea, such as February’s inauguration of President Park Geun-hye.

Neither of his elders made good on threats to restart the Korean War, which the 60-year-old United Nations armistice accord suspended yet didn’t end.

The last time tensions were this high, North Korea threatened to turn Seoul “into a sea of flame.” That 2010 flare-up followed the sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan, which killed 46 sailors, and North Korea’s shelling eight months later of a South Korean border island, in which four people were killed.

Kim is more of a wild card than were his grandfather and his father. He has the unique challenges of being a third- generation dictator, measured against a grandfather revered as the “Great Leader,” who led North Korea into war and ran the nation for more than four decades, and an erratic father, the self-proclaimed “Dear Leader” who sought nuclear status and military might while maintaining a centrally planned economy that impoverishes most North Koreans.

“He’s an extremely isolated young man,” said retired Admiral Dennis Blair, a former director of national intelligence in the Obama administration and a former head of the U.S. Pacific Command. “He’s treated like a god. His father and grandfather were pretty savvy, pretty cold and calculating. I’m sure he’d become that way over time. But this is his first rodeo. He’s pretty inexperienced. I think it’s dangerous because of his inexperience and his youth.”

The situation is “more dangerous than it has been at any time since 1976,” when the U.S. and North Korea nearly came to blows under Kim’s grandfather, said Peter Hayes, executive director of the Nautilus Institute, a research group in Berkeley, California.

In that incident, American soldiers pruning a tree in the demilitarized zone were attacked, and two were killed by North Korean border troops. The U.S. responded with a show of military force, including flying B-52 bombers in the direction of North Korean airspace, and Kim Il Sung subsequently expressed regret for the incident. 

(Bloomberg)