AS AB Abrams points out in his book Immovable Object, by launching a war on Korea in 1950, the United States and its allies succeeded in preventing the imminent peaceful reunification of the country and the holding of elections.

According to sources ranging from the CIA to the Kremlin, the elections would have brought about a democratic victory for the North Korean government, due to its considerable popularity among the southern population.

But, just as later in Vietnam, US aggression prevented a popularly elected government peacefully and democratically reunifying the country.

That conforms with the US ideology of world rule, which does not accept that any other country should be truly sovereign. As Barack Obama said in 2016: “America should write the rules. America should call the shots. Other countries should play by the rules that America and our partners set and not the other way round.”

To achieve this, US administrations regularly break peace agreements made by their predecessors. Crucially for North Korea, the US unilaterally abrogated an article of the Korean War armistice agreement in 1957.

Aware that the cessation of hostilities was far more important to the Chinese and North Koreans than to its own interests — and with US cities and the vast majority of its regional bases well out of harm’s way — the US  was able to illegally violate the armistice without fear of the consequences.

It intended to portray the abrogation as a response to a North Korean or Chinese violation, yet both of the latter were found to be fully in accordance with the agreement, so no such pretext could be used.

Thus the US became the first party to nuclearise the Korean peninsula. It unilaterally deployed nuclear weapons to South Korea from the beginning of 1958 on and president Dwight Eisenhower’s administration allowed US forces, including their nuclear warheads, to provide support for any “unilateral military initiative” by South Korea against the North.

President George W Bush shredded Bill Clinton’s 1994 Agreed Framework and ended denuclearisation talks with North Korea. Similarly, president John Kennedy tore up the 1954 Geneva peace deal by sending 16,000 US troops into Vietnam and president Clinton also tore up the “iron-clad guarantees” to Moscow that Nato would expand “not one inch eastward.”  

As Abrams comments: “Pyongyang remains painfully aware of the nature of its adversary and the fate of those parties which had placed trust in peace agreements with and security guarantees from the US and the Western bloc.”

As Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence acknowledged, the lesson that North Korea’s leadership learnt from Libya giving up its nuclear weapons was: “If you had nukes, never give them up. If you don’t have them, get them.”

Pyongyang would be foolish to trust US assurances of its peaceful intentions. The international director of the State Department-funded Atlas Network NGO told Abrams that the goal of promoting human rights in the North was the total destruction of the country’s political system. This could not be achieved except by a massive assault.

Given the perennial US threat to its survival, it makes sense for North Korea to develop a nuclear deterrent — any US attack on the country would be hugely damaging to its neighbours.

According to Abrams: “There is a strong argument that North Korea’s development of a viable nuclear deterrent with an intercontinental range is strongly in the interests not just of its own population but of peace and stability in the entire region.”

Published by Clarity Press, £21.47.