North Korea isn’t scared of the UN

It surely comes as no surprise to hear that North Korea does not like the United Nations. The hermit kingdom has long derided the organisation as espousing ‘double standards’ in what Pyongyang has believed to be an unfair demonisation of its ‘sovereign rights’ to test missiles, conduct satellite launches – a euphemism for testing ballistic missile technology – or blow up roads and railways linking the communist North with the capitalist South.

So when North Korea’s sharp-tongued ambassador to the UN, Kim Song, announced yesterday that the country would accelerate its nuclear and missile development the timing was anything but random. The reasoning, he said, was the ‘nuclear threat of [the] United States’ against North Korea’. It was surely no coincidence that just two days from then Americans far and wide would head to the polls to choose their next president.

The rhetoric from Kim was no different that the words expounded by his namesake, Kim Jong Un (Kim is the most popular Korean surname after all) only last week.