STEVE CANNANE, PRESENTER: Joining us from Seoul in South Korea is John Delury, Assistant Professor of East Asia Studies at Yonsei University. He's a regular visitor to North Korea. He was in Pyongyang in January as part of a delegation that included Google chairman Eric Schmidt.

John Delury, welcome to Lateline.

JOHN DELURY, EAST ASIA STUDIES, YONSEI UNIVERSITY: Thank you. Good to be with you.

STEVE CANNANE: Over-the-top rhetoric coming out of Pyongyang is nothing new. How serious should we be treating this latest round of threats to the US and to South Korea?

JOHN DELURY: Well, it's been at a sort of fever pitch for a sustained period of time, so I think, although as your report indicated, if you talk to a lot of people, South Koreans have seen this for years and decades, so the mood, you know, here was stoic about it. Still, many North Korea watchers have been concerned that some kind of conflict, the risk of conflict were really increasing over the last couple of weeks, especially some kind of localised conflict, say, on the sea border between the two Koreas. And then the concern was with the new South Korean doctrines of response, that that could quickly escalate into something out of control.

STEVE CANNANE: What is the significance of moves like tearing up the 1953 armistice and also the closing down of the military hotline between the two countries?

JOHN DELURY: Yeah, I think, you know, those are a little less unprecedented than it might appear. A standard position that North Korea takes is the 1953 armistice is not really worth the paper it's written on anyway. North Korea consistently demands negotiation of a peace treaty, and in fact that's part of the six-party talks. The deal is before North Korea completely denuclearises, they get a peace treaty, they get a so-called permanent peace regime on the Peninsula. So for them to say, "We're completely discarding the armistice," is actually part of a standard position for them which is to say, "... because we need to replace the armistice with a peace treaty."

STEVE CANNANE: What about the issue of the hotlines because there were several hotlines operating between the two countries. They shut down the humanitarian hotline last month; now they've shut down the military hotline. Is there a concern that if the two nations aren't talking that this could lead to a miscalculation on the side of North Korea and it could lead to a situation where it would make it very difficult to prevent a certain situation from escalating?

JOHN DELURY: Yes. Those hotlines - that was unnerving when they cut off the hotline. For example, one of the incidents people are aware of in 2010, there was an artillery attack on a South Korean-held island, and the morning of that attack North Korea used that hotline to tell the South, "Don't go through with those exercises today or we're going to do something about it." So that's a very clear example of how the hotlines do communicate real information. Now, South Korea went through with its exercises and of course North Korea then attacked the island. So, it's - the same logic holds with the hotlines as with the armistice, which is that, you know, what North Korea really wants is high-level political dialogue with leaders, especially with Washington, but I think also with South Korea. So, again, throwing out these ultimately very low-level hotlines is to say, "if you really want to channel with us, we need to do it at a much higher level."

STEVE CANNANE: If you look at the photo released last week of Kim Jong-un in his war room where he's apparently signing the order for North Korea's strategic rocket forces to be on standby to fire at US targets, in the background there is a map with the heading "US mainland strike plan". How far off is North Korea from being able to land missiles on the US mainland?

JOHN DELURY: Well, you know, that's a critical question and that's something that military analysts keep looking at, you know, and some would say it's a three-to-five-year, some would say it's more of a 10-year. But obviously, you know, the Pentagon took it seriously enough and the Obama administration took it seriously enough that they announced a major new missile defence program to respond to that threat down the road, I think scheduled for 2017. So that gives us an indication of when the Pentagon on when it needs to have missile defences ready for that kind of capability. I mean, certainly they're making progress with their long-range rocket/missile technology, as we saw with a pretty much successful launch in December, so that's certainly a cause for concern.

STEVE CANNANE: What do you think is driving the rhetoric this time round? Is it a response to the US? Is it a response to the sanctions from the UN? Is it possibly something more to do with a new president in South Korea and testing her mettle out?

JOHN DELURY: I would say all of the above. I mean, if we pick apart this recent cycle, it did start with North Korea's satellite launch. They've insisted before that this is peaceful. They say they're following all the international protocols. They consider it cruel hypocrisy that they're not allowed to launch satellites, but everyone else, including Iran, including South Korea, can. So they're very adamant on that point. In my interactions with North Korean officials, they've consistently emphasised that point. So they take great umbrage at the UN Security Council response and to the US role in that response. So that ticked off this latest cycle, but then of course, they came back with a nuclear test and it's just kind of gone from bad to worse.

As you point out, domestic politics in North Korea are certainly feeding into this because Kim Jong-un is a young leader, still establishing himself after only the second political transition in North Korea's history. The first was when his grandfather died and the second was when his father died. Meanwhile, we have a new leader in South Korea, we have a new leader in Japan, we have a new leader in China. So there's a great deal of transition/instability as all of these leaders set their new foreign policy strategies and consolidate their authority domestically, so that's all feeding into this.

STEVE CANNANE: Kim Jong-un is very inexperienced, as you point out. He's only 30 years old. He had very little experience in military or politics before he took over from his father. What do we know about him and the people who are advising him at the moment?

JOHN DELURY: Well, we know more about the people who are advising him and there've been some very important reshuffling of that leadership recently. Even just today we learned about some important promotions. So, we know the team around him, but there's still a lot of question marks about Kim Jong-un himself. He's presented a very different style than Kim Jong-il in terms of political style, in terms of - he's sort of a populist so far. If you study his moves, he goes out and he's constantly hugging people and kissing children - you know, that sort of politico style, which is quite different. He gives public speeches. In his speeches, he will talk about corruption in the party and talk about the need to change the old ideological way of doing things.

So, he's - I think what he's trying to do, or the people who are producing him are trying to do, is turn his weakness, his youth, into his strength, to say he's got dynamism, he's got energy. But again, he's so young that we really don't know enough and the problem is no-one's really sitting down and talking with him, except someone like Dennis Rodman. So, we - I think there's really a need for a higher level political dialogue so that we can get a better sense of who we're dealing with.

STEVE CANNANE: Well let's talk more about US engagement because Mike Chinoy, the author of Meltdown, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post on the weekend and he said, "Every time Pyongyang has faced pressure, sanctions and coercion, it has responded in precisely the same way by doing the opposite of whatever the heightened pressure was designed to achieve." Is it time to rethink those sanctions?

JOHN DELURY: Yeah, I think it's been - I would agree with Mike and I think Don Gregg, former CIA station chief, and then South Korea - US Ambassador to South Korea, has spoken to this issue and is speaking to this issue in an LA Times piece as well. And what they're saying is that sanctions have not been working for years and that North Korea, if you push them, they will just push back harder. This is a government that endured a famine. They killed minimum 500,000 and quite possibly a much larger number of people in the 1990s in a population of 24 million. So they can withstand, they can endure sanctions. They've been doing that for 60 years. What we've really proven is sanctions don't work. But it's difficult to rethink that policy and it's very hard politically in any country, especially in the United States, it's very hard to say, "I'm gonna go talk to Kim Jong-un. I'm gonna go talk to North Korea." You know, the domestic politics of that are almost inconceivable in the United States, so it's very hard to get the initiative to do it.

STEVE CANNANE: You were in North Korea in January when Google's chairman Eric Schmidt visited, despite those protests from the US State Department. Kim Jong-un says he wants to build a knowledge-based economy. Are there signs of hope there for the future of North Korea?

JOHN DELURY: Yeah, well, one thing we're missing, because we're obviously focused on the security issues and on the nuclear issue, is that Kim Jong-un has been constantly associated, since he was first sort of unveiled to the public in 2010 - and actually I was in North Korea just prior to that - consistently he's been associated with improving the economy. And very explicitly he said, "Our people will never have to tighten their belts again." That's referring to the famine that every North Korean lived through and is aware of. So, he's been making these promises: "I'm gonna improve the people's welfare, improve the people's livelihood," all of these things and he's talked about 21st Century as an information age, a knowledge-based economy and all of this.

So, you know, if you look at the economic side of things, there's a different narrative building. He's making a different kind of set of promises to his people. And in that context, the most recent appointment of a new premier is a very significant one because they just today have changed their premier and appointed a technocratic reformer to head the cabinet, which Kim Jong-un has said needs to be the lead agency for the economy for as a whole. So it's still potential, it's not reality, but there's been a lot of movement in terms of their domestic economy.

STEVE CANNANE: Would economically engaging with North Korea to help them set up a knowledge-based economy end their military-first policy, or would it simply help them to better fund more weapons, more missiles?

JOHN DELURY: That's a great question and that's the dilemma and the problem is, in countries like South Korea, to some extent Japan, maybe increasingly China, you have those two camps going back and forth against one another and so sort of neither really carries the day and you have almost bipolar policies toward North Korea. I would argue that we're not gonna get them to give up their nuclear program through sanctions. We probably won't even be able to do it by offering them a lot of money to say, "Give it up just one time." What we can do is change the fundamental dynamics of their country and of our relationship with their country through economic cooperation. We can give North Korea a different sort of pathway where it starts to grow. You know, North Korea's positioned to be another tiger economy. It's a perfect spot waiting for development in North-East Asia. It's a great trading spot, they have great ports, they have a lot of mineral resources. They have the raw material to develop actually quite quickly. But they need the international security dynamics to change and they're not gonna give up their nuclear weapon first. So, that's the dilemma. It's almost a moral dilemma.

STEVE CANNANE: Sorry to interrupt you there, but, John, you're also an expert on China. I'm wondering how you're seeing the role of China here and whether it's shifting when it comes to supporting North Korea, 'cause of course they've helped prop them up with food and arms and energy over the last decades. Given China has supported the UN sanctions recently, are we seeing China's role shift here?

JOHN DELURY: No, I don't think we're seeing any fundamental shift. I go to China a lot, I talk to Korea experts and some government people in China and, you know, they've still been quite consistent: they don't think sanctions work. And even recently if you look at Chinese government officials, what they're saying is, "Yes, we have to go through with this latest round, but we don't think this is a long-term solution to the problem." So they support dialogue. They think the United States needs to sit down with North Korea. All that said, I do think there are some tensions in the China-North Korea relationship. I think it's odd that Kim Jong-un hasn't visited Beijing or conversely that China hasn't set a really high-level envoy to Pyongyang. So I think something is off. And the new Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, has not established any kind of close connection with Kim Jong-un. So something is off in their bilateral relationship, but I don't think it indicates some fundamental change in China's approach to how to deal with the country.

STEVE CANNANE: John Delury, we'll have to leave it there. Thanks very much for joining us from Seoul tonight.

JOHN DELURY: Thank you.