North Korea's missile tests: A dangerous escalation?

North Korea fired two short-range missiles into the sea off its north coast on Monday. That makes six missile launches in three days for the combative communist regime, in what United

Nations chief Ban Ki-moon calls a "dangerous escalation" of tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

Kim Jong Un's military says the missile launches were legitimate military exercises meant "to cope with the mounting war measures from the U.S. and South Korea," which have held joint

military training recently. And while few people accept that stance at face value, there is a lot of disagreement over what exactly Pyongyang is up to.

The most popular theory is that Kim's regime is making a show of force to impress its people in the wake of annual U.S. and South Korea joint military exercises, which wrapped up last month

after an American nuclear-powered aircraft carrier visited South Korean waters. The effect of Pyongyang's actions, says Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge, is that North Korea is pushing tensions —

and the fear of an actual shooting war — to new heights. With these missile launches, Durden says, Kim Jong Un, who up to now was guilty of nothing more than "endless posturing," has

"escalated from merely constant jawboning into at least some variant of activity."

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Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in

2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News,

and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.