North Korea’s War Would Be “Unbelievable And Absurd,” Fidel Castro Says

Fidel Castro penned an article Friday urging North Korea and the United States to refrain from waging war. Such a conflict, Castro argued, would be “unbelievable and absurd.”

“If war breaks out there, the peoples of both parts of the Peninsula will be terribly sacrificed, without benefit to all or either of them,” Castro wrote. “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was always friendly with Cuba, as Cuba has always been and will continue to be with her.”

North Korea and Cuba are two of the only communist countries left in the world. Castro maintained his country’s alliance with North Korea, but he urged the country to consider the gravity of risking a nuclear war in a region of the world containing five million of the world’s seven million people.

“Now that the country has demonstrated its technical and scientific achievements, we remind her of her duties to the countries which have been her great friends, and it would be unjust to forget that such a war would particularly affect more than 70% of the population of the planet,” Castro wrote.

Cuba’s ailing leader recalled how the Korean War cost millions of lives just five years after the US dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing and irradiating hundreds of thousands of people. He asserted that even though General Douglas MacArthur wanted to deploy atomic weapons against North Korea during the war, “not even” President Harry Truman would allow it. Truman was the president who authorized the use of atomic weapons against Japan, the one time any country has ever deployed atomic weapons against another.

“If a conflict of that nature should break out there, the government of Barack Obama in his second mandate would be buried in a deluge of images which would present him as the most sinister character in the history of the United States,” Castro wrote. “The duty of avoiding war is also his and that of the people of the United States.”

Castro’s article appeared on the front page of Granma, the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party. The paper draws its name from the yacht Castro and 81 other rebels rode to Cuba’s shores in 1956, sparking the Cuban Revolution.

Tensions have escalated on the Korean peninsula dramatically in recent weeks, but few believe that North Korea is willing to act on its boisterous threats. Analysts have determined that Kim Jong-Un is using war rhetoric to consolidate power within North Korea by demonstrating his might in the face of foreign threats.

[Image via Wikimedia Commons]