North Korea’s spring has started with a bang. The United States and South Korea have staged their largest joint military exercises in five years, and Pyongyang’s rhetoric is becoming more aggressive. Kim Jong Un has warned that the US and South Korea would ‘plunge into despair’ for holding the drills, as he fired two missiles into the sea between the Korean Peninsula and Japan.
Kim’s regime has already fired more than 20 missiles this year, launching increasingly ambitious and sophisticated ballistic and cruise missiles. Earlier this week, North Korean state media proudly claimed that the regime had developed tactical nuclear weapons for the first time. Photographs showed Kim inspecting what looked like miniaturised nuclear warheads that could fit onto short-range ballistic missiles. They could target South Korea and help the North to ‘defend the eternal security of the state’, the regime said. Last week too, state media claimed that the DPRK had developed an ‘underwater nuclear attack drone’ that could unleash a ‘radioactive tsunami’ on the United States.
All of this is part of Kim’s plan to modernise and expand Pyongyang’s military arsenal, as he said he would do at the 8th Congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea in January 2021.
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