How North Korea's Kim Jong Un is revving up nuclear and military intimidation tactics
North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un has intensified his inflammatory talk, military posturing and changes in policy, ending several agreements aimed at keeping peace on the Korean Peninsula.
On Friday, North Korea claimed, without providing evidence, that it successfully tested an underwater nuclear weapons system in response to what its state media described as "provocative" naval drills by the United States, South Korea and Japan.
Here's three recent ways one of the world's poorest and most isolated regimes, whose relationship with the U.S. has been historically tense and hostile, has been saber-rattling.
North-South unification. Suddenly, it's over?
The two Koreas have been divided since the Korean War ended in 1953. But seemingly out of nowhere, Kim declared this week that his country's former goal of re-unification with the South has been scrapped.
In a speech to the North's rubber-stamp Parliament on Jan. 16, Kim accused the South of attempting to promote regime change. He asked lawmakers to change the North's constitution to refer to the South as “number one hostile state," according to the state-run KCNA news agency.
Kim regularly makes threatening speeches connected to his country's diplomatic and military moves. He previously closed down a communications hotline with the South aimed at preventing a military escalation. But his speech on re-unification marks a departure from decades of official policy that saw reconciliation and unification as the ultimate goal. South Korea criticized the move as an "anti-national and ahistorical" nature.
A barrage of drills and weapons tests
The North routinely tests missiles: nuclear, long-range ballistic ones, drones. In 2022, it test-launched over 70 ballistic and cruise missiles, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a British think tank.
The South said that Pyongyang's claims to have tested a new, underwater nuclear device -- something the North has said it has done before -- were exaggerated. The last confirmed time the North tested a nuclear bomb was in 2017, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a U.S. think tank. This was a thermonuclear device that was six times more powerful than the one the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
Still, since the start of the year, there's been a noticeable jump in the North's military activity. On Jan. 14, it claimed to have tested a new type of intermediate-range ballistic missile. That followed live-five military exercises it carried out in the first week of January. CSIS analysts say the North tends to ramp up its provocations during U.S. election years. But Lyle Goldstein, a military expert who is the director of Asia Engagement at the U.S. think tank Defense Priorities, said if North Korea dared to launch an ICBM at the U.S. it would be destroyed.
"(Kim) is extremely unlikely to commit national suicide in this way."
The Putin meetings
As Russia's war in Ukraine has dragged on, Moscow has started to run low on ammunition. One place it may have turned to replenish these is Pyongyang.
Both Kim and Russian President Vladimir Putin have denied they have made any arms deals. However, they have vowed to deepen cooperation economically and technologically, and Kim made a rare visit to Russia to meet with Putin in September last year.
"I think it says a lot that Russia is having to turn to a country like North Korea to seek to bolster its defense capacity in a war that it expected would be over in a week, that in September of 2023 it is going to North Korea to get munitions to try to continue to grind it out on the battlefield in Ukraine," President Joe Biden's National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said at the time.
"Though it appears things could not get any worse with Kim Jong Un," wrote CSIS analysts in a recent commentary, "all these patterns suggest 2024 will be a rocky year."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: North Korea's Kim Jong Un is ramping up nuclear intimidation campaign