This seems qualitatively different from past bouts of threats:
North Korea says it is scrapping all non-aggression pacts with South Korea, closing its hotline with Seoul and shutting their shared border point.
Add in large-scale North Korean military maneuvers, and this paints a far more ominous picture.
Granted, if North Korea starts a war, the chance of them surviving the war let alone winning it is pretty low. Their military has rusted away over the last couple decades.
But if North Korea starts something, it will be particularly ugly for the very reason that the North Korean military is so poorly prepared to fight a conventional war. North Korea would have to initiate the war with mass use of chemical weapons to have a chance of winning. Slam Seoul with chemicals to sow panic and confusion in the government (messing with command and control and distracting leaders with immediate civilian needs) while hitting military targets in the hope that chemical weapons will cause enough panic to open wide gaps in the front line allowing North Korean troops to motor south with minimal resistance.
Perhaps closing the hotline, shutting the border post, and declaring the ceasefire dead (or is that included in the pacts scrapped?) are just more of the same, but I don't recall these things being done before. I might just be unaware of past similar incidents.
And given that South Koreans have gotten used to threats to turn Seoul into a sea of fire, perhaps the North Koreans feel they need to turn the Psycho Dial to 11 to generate the same amount of fear.
UPDATE: North Korea says the armistice is no longer valid. In 2003, according to this article, North Korea said that they might have no alternative but to stop honoring the armistice; and in 2009, the North Koreans said they were no longer bound by the armistice.
The 2003 event seems more like a threat to abandon the 1953 ceasefire. Whether not honoring the ceasefire is different than declaring it invalid is beyond my comprehension of North Korean legal thought.
Does this mean we get a free shot at North Korea? I mean, we are on a break, right?
