Conflicts between Koreas (2013)

EOUL, South Korea — As North Korea warned foreigners on Tuesday that they might want to leave South Korea because the peninsula was on the brink of nuclear war — a statement that analysts dismissed as hyperbole — the American commander in the Pacific expressed worries that the North’s young leader, Kim Jong-un, might not have left himself an easy exit to reduce tensions.

The administration has settled on a strategy of refusing to make concessions to the North and has adopted a new plan to deter any hostilities by promising a proportionate response. In doing so, it hopes to reverse what it considers a long-term pattern in which the West offers aid to calm tensions and then North Korea breaks its promises to halt its nuclear program. But Obama administration officials acknowledge that the new strategy will work only if Mr. Kim either backs down or satisfies himself with a token show of force, like a missile test into the open ocean. The South Koreans have warned such a test could happen as early as this week.

At the core of the concern within the administration and the intelligence agencies is that they do not understand Mr. Kim’s motivations. His father and grandfather suggested, at times, that they might be willing to negotiate to end their nuclear program. But Mr. Kim arrived in power with a small nuclear arsenal — the fuel for about six to a dozen weapons, according to intelligence officials, and a pathway to make more — and he may be calculating that with those potential weapons in hand, he is less vulnerable to attack.

“He may think he has more running room than the rest of the family did,” one administration official said this week, “and that can lead to miscalculation.”

The United States’ harder line has also been adopted by the South’s conservative new president, Park Geun-hye, who parried the North’s latest threat on Tuesday by saying she remained determined not to succumb to what she said were efforts to escalate tensions.

“How long are we going to repeat this vicious cycle where the North Koreans create tensions and we give them compromises and aid?” she said at a cabinet meeting. The North’s latest warning carried the same ominous tone as the flood of threats since the United States led a successful effort to impose sanctions on Pyongyang for conducting its third nuclear test in February.

“The situation on the Korean Peninsula is inching close to a thermonuclear war due to the evermore undisguised hostile actions of the United States and the South Korean puppet warmongers,” the Korea Asia-Pacific Peace Committee, a North Korean state agency, said in a statement. The statement added that the North “does not want to see foreigners in South Korea fall victim to the war.”

Experts saw the new threat as part of what they have begun referring to as “psychological warfare,” meant to force concessions from Washington and Seoul. In recent days, analysts say, those threats have appeared designed specifically to cause jitters among businesses and investors in South Korea, perhaps reflecting a calculation that Ms. Park might be unable to stand as firm if her country’s already weakened economy is seriously threatened.

The North’s warning followed a similar advisory last week in which it told foreign embassies in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, to devise evacuation plans. And it came a day after the North said it was temporarily suspending operations at a joint North and South Korean industrial park; the South had previously assuaged investors’ fears about possible hostilities by saying the operations at the factories were continuing despite the North’s belligerent stance.

In South Korea, where people are somewhat inured to North Korea’s bluster — or have at least learned to ignore a threat that is out of their control — there were no signs of panic on Tuesday. And the American Embassy in Seoul noted that the State Department’s travel notice about South Korea was unchanged and did not recommend any special precautions for United States citizens living in South Korea or planning to visit.