US bombers flying close to N Korea border not smart: Analyst

Press TV has talked to Michael Penn, a journalist and political commentator from Tokyo, to further discuss a US bomber flying close to North Korean border.

Here is a rough transcription of the interview:

Press TV: How do you assess if this was a smart move by the United States, because it would imagine Pyongyang will respond quite harshly?

Penn: I doubt it was a smart move, I think that anything that provokes unnecessary tensions is something that should be avoided. If we presume that flying this plane close to the border was meant to intimidate the North Koreans or to show them the military saber, I agree that it’s probably not very productive.

Press TV: We’ve already had one of the biggest nuclear tests by Pyongyang taken place recently, what more do you think the North will do, because I would imagine that it will feel the need to react to this, won’t it?

Penn: It may just choose to ignore it or it may choose to make comments. I would be surprised if there was a serious military response on the North Koreans side, because, look, What do they want? They want to have time to develop their missiles, they want to have time to develop their nuclear weapons, and so for them not provoking an early conflict would be in their interests.

So, I would presume that the North Koreans basically just want to buy time to develop their technology.

Press TV: It seems that South Korea is in the middle of all this, isn't it? Because I imagine that many people in South Korea aren’t looking for this sort of an escalation at all.

Penn: Absolutely, if hostilities do break out, it's pretty clear that the Korean people are going to suffer the worst and as everybody knows, forgetting even about the nuclear weapons the conventional warfare possibilities on the Korean Peninsula are horrific.

Estimates say that if the North Koreans let loose their artillery on Seoul it could kill something like a million people, who knows the reality! But the estimates are up there. So, any kind of conflict is not something that South Koreans are going to want and these kinds of escalations would generally make them nervous I would presume.

Press TV: Do you think the South Korean government, because Park Geun has been quite strong in her rhetoric towards the North, do you think that she's asking the United States or maybe tone it down?

Penn: Hard to say. Among conservatives in any country there's a school of thought which says that by acting in the strong way you’re deterring even worse aggression; so I presume that in the South Korean government there's counsel saying it's perfectly fine for the United States to flex its muscles because that's something that may keep a larger conflict from happening, and on the other hand there would be people arguing yes, but maybe this is producing something we don't want, it might provoke something we don't want.

So I would think that in the South Korean government there's mixed counsels, but I don't know which one that the administration favors.

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