It is a direly sinister coincidence that North Korea’s launch on Friday of yet another missile over Japan has coincided with Pyongyang’s bluster against Japan and the US, altogether a conscious mockery of the canons of international relations.

That bluster has been reinforced by Friday’s missile test, and it is time for America, Russia, and China to intervene. In the aftermath of the fresh Security Council sanctions in response to the regime’s recent nuclear test, North Korea has threatened to sink Japan, and “beat America to death like a rabid dog, reducing the country to ashes and darkness”. Chiefly, the sanctions ban textile exports and impose a cap on coal and minerals.

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The language of diplomacy is beneath contempt even at the mildest estimation; the Kim regime has violated the certitudes of civility. Tokyo has promptly condemned the decidedly unwarranted verbal posturing as “absolutely unacceptable provocation”, a response that has been buttressed by Shinzo Abe and Narendra Modi in course of the Japanese Prime Minister’s visit to Gujarat. The ugly development across the oceans has overshadowed the foundation of the bullet train.

The debunking of the Security Council ~ a “tool of evil in the pay of Washington and made up of money-bribed countries that move on the orders of the US” ~ surpasses Donald Trump’s condemnation of the world body as a redundant entity in this day and age. The Korea Asia-Pacific peace committee, which oversees North Korea’s foreign policy, would rather the Council is “broken up”.

“The four islands of the [Japanese] archipelago should be sunken into the sea by the nuclear bomb of Juche,” the committee said in a statement carried by the official KCNA news agency. Juche is said to be the North’s ruling ideology that blends Marxism with an extreme form of “go-it-alone” nationalim preached by founder Kim Il-sung, the grandfather of the present leader, Kim Jong-un. “Japan is no longer needed to exist near us “ is the perilously skewed perception of geopolitics.

This is the first time that Pyongyang has issued an explicit threat to Japan since it fired a medium-range ballistic missile over the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido at the end of August, triggering emergency sirens and mass text alerts. Considering the awesome build-up of tension in the peninsula, the response of South Korea ~ no less a target ~ has been remarkably restrained.

The country’s President, Moon Jae-un, has let it be known that he is against having nuclear weapons in his country, either by developing its own arsenal or by bringing back US tactical weapons that were withdrawn in the early 1990s.

Very pertinently, he has cautioned that “our own nuclear weapons” will not bring about peace in the Korean peninsula and “could lead to a nuclear arms race in north-east Asia”. He has hit the bull’s eye and the world expects North Korea to respond responsibly.