SEOUL -- North Korea may be looking to relieve tensions on the Korean Peninsula after having increased them to a near-boiling point over the past weeks with almost daily threats against South Korea and the United States, a senior U.S. military official in Seoul said Tuesday.
"I think the DPRK leadership is trying to figure out a way off from the heightened state of rhetoric we have seen over the past couple of weeks," the senior U.S. official told reporters and correspondents in Seoul.
| That's nice. Look behind you, there's a solid wall marked No Escape Here. Quite possibly Sun Tsu would not approve. |
| And no, you can't make like a cartoon character and paint a door onto the wall, then pass through... |
Although the reclusive communist nation has ratcheted up its bellicose rhetoric recently -- particularly against the South Korea-U.S. joint annual drills this March and additional U.N. sanctions imposed earlier on the North for its third nuclear test in February -- North Korea's threats have been "always conditional," the official said.
"So if the U.S. does this, then (the North says) we are going to do this. So there was always a backdoor to it (tension)," the official said. "What I would hope is that they are exploring the use of that backdoor to scale back their rhetoric."
The U.S. official said Seoul and Washington have been closely watching for signs of a missile launch or any provocations, but North Korea has not recently shown any large-scale troop movements or exercises.
"The launch of an intermediate-range missile is one of many tactical levels of provocations we've been exploring and trying to figure out what the true intentions are," the official said. "Any of those things can happen with little to no notice and we may not know that it happens until the missiles are launched." |
