The small South Korean town of Pyeongchang, host of this year’s Wnter Olympics, has suddenly become the epicentre of one of the most dangerous games in world politics.
Since the turn of the year, however, there has been an extraordinary rapprchment between the North and South. This week, a cruise ship carrying North Korean musicians, singers and dancers docked in South Korea, part of a 500-strong delegation sent by Pyongyang for the Games, which start on 9 February.
A sudden announcement during North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s New Year’s address set the stage for a significant cooling of tensions, and now the focus has shifted from potential doom to maintaining the first signs of dialogue in years.
But the competition will take place in the shadow of a deepening confrontation between the United States and North Korea over Kim’s nuclear and missile program. That conflict, which seemed to reach a breaking point in January with a false alarm about a pending missile attack on Hawaii, has moved the world closer to nuclear war than at any time since 1953, according to the famous “Doomsday Clock” calculated every year by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
“With every threat, every reckless or contradictory tweet from the Commander-in-Chief of our military, we get a little bit further from a diplomatic solution and a little bit closer to war,” Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq War combat veteran from Illinois,said in a January speech at Georgetown University shortly after returning from a trip to South Korea.
As many as 60,000 security personnel and soldiers will be out in force each day during the Games, twice as many as in Rio de Janeiro, a far more dangerous city when it comes to violent crime.
> Shiuly Akter
Winter Olympics Bring a Glimpse of Peace to Korean Peninsula
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