Update: December 23, 2010 1pm:– When the North failed to respond to the live fire drill on Yeonpyeong Island, the South decided to ramp up their drills substantially with fighter jets and tanks. In light of this, the North is renewing their threats to “unleash a holy war” on the South using nuclear weapons.
I may have been premature in declaring the North Korean threats nothing more than posturing, and in light of the thousands of views that this story has had today alone, I will continue to update it as events unfold.
Update: December 20, 2010, 11:30am – It would appear that the recent threats of retaliation were indeed nothing more than posturing by North Korea. The live fire drills which lasted just over an hour on Yeonpyeong Island were uneventful and while the South remains on high alert, the North continues to issue bizarre statements including this one issued today to the Korea News Service Agency KNCA;
“The second and third powerful retaliatory strike to be made by the revolutionary armed forces of the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) knowing no limit as declared before the world will lead to blowing up the bases of the U.S. and South Korean puppet warmongers.”
While it’s encouraging that the threats made by the North appear to be nothing more than affectation, I for one will certainly have a curious eye on the Peninsula for the foreseeable future.
December 19, 2010
By Jeff Parkinson – Canadian Advocates for Charter Equality (CANACE)
As atrocious as the situation in our own back yard has been for the past nearly 5 years, I’m reminded on occasion how good we have it in Canada. 
While researching what was to be a tongue in cheek comparison of the personalities and human rights records of Julian Fantino and Kim Jong Il, I stumbled onto an alarming report that North Korea is threatening to attack the South with nuclear weapons in the near future.
North and South Korea have officially been at war since June 25, 1950 and although an armistice was signed in 1953, there has never been an official peace treaty. The current threat of nuclear war was buried in a story about South Korea planning to hold a military drill on an island bordering the North, but in the territory of the South.
In an Aljazeera story titled “S Korea military drills to go ahead” North Korean officials were quoted as saying that they ““will deal the second and third unpredictable self-defensive blow” to protect its territorial waters and that it will be “deadlier than what was made on November 23 in terms of the powerfulness and sphere of the strike”.
While it would be fun at this point to compare that to similarly incoherent statements made by Fantino, the next quote was quite concise and not funny at all. In a statement posted on Pyongyang’s official website Uriminzokkiri, they warned that “another war with South Korea would involve nuclear weapons.”
JeffParkinson.ca 