Image by Thomas Evans.
At a glimpse, the 7-foot cylindrical silhouette of the MK-82, a 500-lbs bomb manufactured by General Dynamics, could be mistaken for a human being falling from the sky. With an 89 kg explosive payload, the bomb shreds its steel hull upon impact, scattering shrapnel that can rip flesh and bone over a lethal radius the size of a soccer field-sized. Designed to be deployed in large numbers, the MK-82 was created to saturate battlefields in storms of fire and metal shards. First deployed by the US Air Force in the 1950s, the MK-82 has left a trail of impact craters, maimed bodies, and mass graves across the world from Vietnam to Iraq. Today, it is one of the primary weapons in Israel’s arsenal of genocide. On March 6, 2025, the unsuspecting village of Nogok-ri, close to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) which bisects the Korean peninsula, became the target of eight MK-82 bombs dropped by two Republic of Korea Air Force fighter jets participating in a live-fire military drill with US Forces Korea. The resulting blasts sent tremors throughout Nogok-ri, damaging 142 homes, a local church, and other infrastructure. In the days following the bombing, 33 injuries were reported.
Nogok-ri is a small hamlet on the northern edges of Pocheon, a city of roughly 160,000 people less than 20 miles from the DMZ. Most of the city’s residents are employed by the city’s farms and factories, but another defining characteristic of Pocheon is its militarization. Pocheon is encircled by US and ROK firing ranges, places where the militaries of both nations train daily with live ammunition ranging from small arms to tanks, mortars, rocket firing systems, and even airstrikes with weapons like the MK-82. For decades, Pocheon’s residents have spoken out against the firing ranges. The constant sound of gunfire and detonated explosives is a unique kind of torture unimaginable for those who have never heard the crack of a bullet, much less the blast of a 500-lbs bomb. The chemical byproducts of weapons and the daily operations of the US and ROK militaries poison the air, soil, and water. And of course, military “accidents” are all-too-common. In one interview with Reuters in 20XX, a Pocheon resident described how he would collect stray shells to sell as a child; another resident incorporated bullet casings and other military detritus into the construction of his home. In Pocheon, as in so many places occupied by the US military, the lines between war and peace blur to nearly meaningless distinction.
Pointing fingers
In the wake of the Nogok-ri bombing, the ROK government moved swiftly to scapegoat the pilots, who are said to have entered incorrect coordinates during their training exercise. South Korean organizations and anti-base activists have severely criticized the narrative pushed by the ROK government and media. If it is relevant at all, human error is only a small part of the story, and emphasizing it leaves the role of US and ROK military authorities out of the picture. While US and ROK war drills are officially termed “joint military exercises,” the structural relationship between the two militaries cannot be described as one between equal parties. The ROK military’s very existence is a product of the US occupation of Korea that began after WWII; to this day, the US military retains operational wartime command over its ROK counterpart. Decisions regarding the budgeting, arsenal, and organization of the ROK military are not made independently, but in tight coordination with Washington. As a matter of course, the military drill that resulted in the bombing of Nogok-ri almost certainly featured US military officials in a commanding role. A statement from the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions brings the responsibility of the US and ROK military authorities into clear relief:
This is an accident that would not have happened if the South Korean and US military authorities had not conducted live-fire training using large-scale combat equipment in the first place. Even in the unprecedented situation where the commander-in-chief of the Korean military was arrested on charges of mobilizing the military to instigate a civil war, the South Korean and US military authorities forced through live-fire training in the border area…the South Korean and US military authorities are not only increasing military tensions on the Korean Peninsula, but are also threatening the lives and safety of residents in the border area. Responsibility for this accident lies with the South Korean and US military authorities who forced through extremely dangerous training at the expense of the lives of residents in the border area.
As the KCTU’s statement alludes to, the US and ROK have undertaken a drastic escalation in military activity on the peninsula in recent years. The military drill that decimated Nogok-ri took place as part of the lead-up to Freedom Shield, a massive series of hundreds of war games held annually each spring that ran from March 10 to 21 this year. The US and ROK describe Freedom Shield and other joint war games as “defensive” military exercises. Yet, the details of Freedom Shield and other large-scale war exercises tell a different story. In these drills, the US and ROK routinely rehearse the invasion and occupation of the DPRK, as well as the use of strategic military assets capable of immense human destruction such as nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, the B1-B bomber, and other weapons platforms capable of delivering payloads far greater than the MK-82. Perhaps the best recent illustration of the true character of these war games is the Iron Mace 24 exercise conducted last summer, in which the US and ROK practiced plans for a joint nuclear strike on the Korean peninsula. To call these war games “defensive” obscures a reality that became clear as day in Nogok-ri: US-ROK war drills in Korea are rehearsals for war crimes.
Freedom Shield 25 featured 16 brigade level combined firepower exercises—the largest ever on record. Besides these combined drills, Freedom Shield also included over 280 individual drills, combining ground, air, naval, space, and cyber warfare units over the course of its 11-day run. In a concurrent but officially separate exercise, the navies of the US, Japan, and ROK also conducted exercises off the coast of Jeju Island on March 20. The precise number of US troops deployed for Freedom Shield remains unknown; the Pentagon refuses to disclose this information to the South Korean and US public. What is known is that at least 12,500 ROK troops participated, along with roughly 100 soldiers from 11 additional member states of the United Nations Command: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Colombia, France, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, New Zealand, the Philippines, and Thailand. This is the second time Freedom Shield has been expanded to a multilateral exercise of such magnitude; in 2024, the same 11 United Nations Command members joined Freedom Shield for the first time. Despite its name, the UN Command is not an official UN agency and is not subject to UN oversight—it is entirely a US creation.
The expansion of Freedom Shield 25 is merely the latest escalation in a years-long pattern of growing US aggression. While large-scale US war exercises have regularly taken place in Korea since the 1976 debut of “Team Spirit,” a predecessor to Freedom Shield, Washington has undertaken an unprecedented acceleration of its war threats in Korea in recent years. Large-scale war drills were reintroduced to Korea in 2022 under Biden following a brief pause due to the COVID-19 pandemic. War drills are now a near daily occurrence in Korea. In 2023, the US undertook over 200 days of war drills in Korea. In 2024, 275 days of the year were spent conducting military drills in Korea—the most ever recorded. Despite the Trump administration’s brazen claims to desire a return to dialogue with the DPRK, the US military is on track to shatter its previous record with a more than 10% increase in the number of war drills in Korea.
The Pentagon and its counterparts in Seoul prefer their military drills to remain out of sight and out of mind for the publics of both countries. While Freedom Shield and other large-scale drills are covered by the media, dissenting voices rarely penetrate the narrative. If anything, the bulk of media attention usually goes to the inevitable response from the DPRK, which is compelled to issue blistering statements and conduct its own shows of force to uphold deterrence against the sort of invasions Freedom Shield rehearses. Nogok-ri has punched a hole in this narrative armor, reminding us of a simple truth: when a bomb explodes in a village, it makes a sound, shakes the earth, and shatters windows and bones—even when only Koreans are around to hear it.
Trump’s push for diplomacy
The narrative battle opened up by the bombing of Nogok-ri is especially important in the era of Trump. Since entering office, the president has made no secret that rekindling negotiations with North Korea is a priority for his administration. Corporate media has long portrayed Trump’s relationship with Kim Jong Un as a “bromance,” and the president has embraced this depiction, wielding the narrative to project an image of himself as a diplomat of world-historical aplomb who is uniquely capable of undoing the Gordian Knot of the Korean nuclear crisis. For detractors and supporters alike, the mystique of Trump’s personal charisma often goes unquestioned. The DPRK’s Korean Central News Agency offers some much-needed clarification on the subject:
“Even if any administration [sic] takes office in the U.S., the political climate, which is confused by the infighting of the two parties, does not change and, accordingly, we do not care about this. It is true that Trump, when he was president, tried to reflect the special personal relations between the heads of states in the relations between states, but he did not bring about any substantial positive change…The foreign policy of a state and personal feelings must be strictly distinguished.”
The KCNA’s statement raises a point that is often entirely absent from the overall discussion on US-Korea relations: the DPRK’s perspective as a rational historical actor. Washington’s practice of unilateralism creates the illusion among its intelligentsia and politicians that others must simply accept the realities it imposes upon the world. This is typical imperial hubris, and it helps explain the bewilderment that greeted Trump’s first round of negotiations with Pyongyang. Americans are accustomed to viewing their involvement in Korea in terms so Manichaean they border on childishness: the enemy is evil and motivated by evil alone, and all that is rational and good is represented in Washington’s interests. This view is more than propaganda intended to influence popular perception—it is a genuine expression of Washington’s self-conception, which has now become dangerously detached from reality.
The reality in Korea today is straightforward: the US has lost its relative strategic advantage vis-a-vis the DPRK, to the point that Pyongyang no longer needs to entertain its enemy’s offers of “peace.” The DPRK’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, intercontinental ballistic capabilities, and other military technology is the key factor in the equation. It is worth pointing out that Washington never once entertained serious negotiations with Pyongyang following the signing of the Korean War Armistice in 1953 and the failure to achieve a peace treaty at the Geneva Conference in 1954. Decades of suspended warfare and tense brinkmanship without a political and legal conclusion were preferable to a peace that could result in the normalization of the DPRK. In 1973 and 1974, the DPRK made direct overtures to Congress requesting the removal of US troops and a formal peace agreement, only to be rebuffed. Just 15 years later, Washington was forced to diplomatically engage Pyongyang when word of the latter’s nuclear program first surfaced. Over the course of the next 30 years, the two foes would engage in multiple rounds of failed engagement, concluding with Trump’s own negotiations at the end of the prior decade.
Washington’s pivot towards diplomatic engagement was never inspired by a desire for peace, reconciliation or historical justice, but was always driven by the cold logic of realpolitik. The gradual development of Pyongyang’s military capabilities forced the US to come to the table to seek a diplomatic resolution that could protect its strategic advantages and impose military limits on the DPRK. This is proven by the fact that every US president since Bush Sr. to Trump in his first term (time will tell if Biden was among this ignominious cohort) seriously considered launching preemptive strikes on the DPRK, but was inevitably forced to pursue other options by a simple reality: since the 1980s, Pyongyang’s capacities for retaliation exceed the costs Washington has been willing to bear. At the start of the era of dialogue, it was the threat of Pyongyang’s missiles striking US bases in Korea and Japan that deterred Washington. Today, it is the fact that any strike on the DPRK could easily result in a strike on the US homeland.
The underlying strategic tension driving Washington’s past engagement with the DPRK helps to explain its conduct in these talks, conduct which ultimately scuttled the possibility of future dialogue in Trump’s first term. While the US has always sought to use negotiations to disarm the DPRK, its flexibility in achieving this goal has hardened with time. Bush Sr. was willing to withdraw US nuclear weapons from the peninsula to advance dialogue; Clinton offered assistance with a nuclear energy program for civilian use, and eventual diplomatic normalization in exchange for denuclearization as part of an accord known as the Agreed Framework. George W. Bush would eventually scrap the Agreed Framework, giving Pyongyang the green light to conduct its first nuclear test in 2006, which then compelled Washington to return to the table for the Six Party Talks, which would fall apart in 2009 under Obama after his administration imposed additional sanctions on the DPRK in retaliation for conducting a satellite test that Washington did not approve of.
Following the failure of the Six Party Talks, US-DPRK diplomacy would halt for almost a decade. In 2016 and 2017, Pyongyang conducted new ballistic missile and nuclear weapons tests demonstrating its capacity to strike the entirety of the US mainland. Following a very public eruption of volcanic rage in which he threatened to “destroy” Kore entirely, Trump was forced back to the table. The conciliatory position of South Korea’s Moon Jae-In administration would help to grease the wheels of this process, but the responsibility to recognize the gravity of the moment and proceed accordingly lay entirely on Washington. In this, the US failed. The Trump-Kim dialogue suffered two deaths: first, the Trump team flatly rejected the DPRK’s offer during the 2019 Hanoi Summit to shut down its Yongbyon nuclear complex in exchange for partial sanctions relief; second, Trump squandered an opportunity to rekindle dialogue following his surprise visit to the DMZ later that summer. After a much-publicized photo op of the two leaders along the historic line of division on the peninsula, Washington proceeded with the Ulchi Freedom Shield war games that August, in which an ROK-led occupation of the DPRK was rehearsed. This was the final straw. Just a few months later, Pyongyang detonated the joint XX office in the border city of Kaesong, signaling a final end to the diplomatic process with Trump.
There is a chance the Biden administration could have recovered the possibility of dialogue, although we will never know. Biden wasted no time in accelerating military threats against the DPRK, while offering nothing qualitatively different than Trump in the way of concessions. With the election of the now-ousted Yoon Suk Yeol in the ROK in 2022, the climate of hostility quickly reached a boiling point. In 2022, the Supreme People’s Assembly, the highest organ of political power in the DPRK, passed a law proclaiming the country’s irrevocable nuclear status, and barring all future negotiations with foreign powers concerning its nuclear arsenal. Just over a year later, the Workers’ Party of Korea abandoned its historic position of peaceful reunification of the peninsula, declaring the ROK a hostile enemy state that could not be trusted as a partner in a shared future. This is the political climate Trump’s renewed calls for dialogue occur in, and thus far he has offered nothing substantial to entice Pyongyang to return to the negotiating table. Meanwhile, US escalation proceeds unrestrained, as the ruins of Nogok-ri remind us.
Is Pocheon the future?
If Trump’s first attempted engagement with the DPRK was a tragedy; today, it has become a farce. The commensurate dealmaker has returned with an offer that simply does not reflect the times. Pyongyang has made tremendous strides in its deterrence capabilities since 2020; today its nuclear arsenal is completely mobile, and it possesses military satellites, nuclear submarines, hypersonic missiles and other technology that vastly amplifies the range of its strikes and its capabilities to evade US defenses.
The international environment is also drastically different. The illusion of permanent US hegemony has shattered. Washington has taken a sledgehammer to the liberal international order it birthed from the ruins of WWII, first under Biden to facilitate the zionist genocide in Gaza, and now under the auspices of Trump’s mandate to Make America Great Again. In the meantime, Pyongyang has deepened its ties with rising great powers in Beijing and Moscow, and capitalized on the Ukraine War to end its economic isolation through expanded trade with Russia in particular.
The changes in the international environment have also catalyzed rapid advances within the DPRK itself. In 2017, US sanctions imposed the worst year for foreign trade the DPRK had seen since the fall of the Soviet Union; back then, its recovery from the painful years of natural disaster and famine in the 1990s was fragile and incomplete. Today, the DPRK is undertaking a vast effort to equalize the standard of living across the country over the next decade through an emphasis on rural economic development, education, and housing known as the 20×10 Rural Development Plan. This year, the 5-year project to build 50,000 new, free, and modern apartments in Pyongyang is expected to be completed on schedule. While international headlines blare with news of this or that condemnation or weapons test, the internal priorities of the Workers’ Party are entirely dedicated to the advancement of the country’s economy and standard of living. While Trump chases illusions of a future generated by ChatGPT-consulted tariffs, the DPRK is expanding the foundations of its real economy in industrial production, next generation agricultural technologies, and most fundamentally, in its people.
Witness the difference between the impact of unprecedented flooding in the DPRK’s central regions and Appalachia in 2024. Whereas Pyongyang prioritized the immediate relocation of affected residents and the rapid reconstruction of affected areas, Americans are still awaiting a sound plan for the regions redevelopment, and displaced survivors have been kicked out of their hotels by FEMA once their allotted period of aid expired. Survivors in Nogok-ri, itself in the distant periphery of the American empire, likely face a similar fate.
The temptation exists to proclaim the final victory of the world’s sovereign peoples, including sovereign Korea, over US imperialism. This would be premature. The empire is choking on internal wounds of its own making, but its capacity for apocalyptic violence remains. The ongoing devastation of Gaza and the wider Arab Region is a constant reminder; the bombing of Nogok-ri is a sign of how swiftly the locus of US violence can pivot. If Washington is willing to expend eight MK-82s in a single air drill, how many will it deploy for a war for the survival of its hegemony, one which will very likely be fought in Korea?
The post Diplomacy or Deception? Trump’s North Korea Strategy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ju-Hyun Park.