North Korea’s nuclear sabre-rattling isn’t frightening

North Korea would like you to know that it has nuclear weapons. It has put rather a lot of effort in recent weeks into making you aware. And if you haven’t thought much about North Korea’s nuclear programme in the last few days, it means its propaganda effort has failed.

Here is what North Korea’s leaders want you to know. On September 9, North Korean media announced that the country has officially declared itself a nuclear weapons state. In a speech to the rubber-stamp Supreme People’s Assembly, Kim Jong-Un declared that this made his country’s nuclear programme ‘irreversible’, and declared that they would never give up their weapons even in the face of a hundred years of sanctions.

At the same time, the country has passed a law allowing a ‘pre-emptive’ nuclear attack, using the weapons ‘automatically’ in cases that are still murkily defined.

One of these seems to be threats to the leadership – which many excitable news outlets think means that Kim Jong-Un has willed his successor to start throwing missiles around when he dies.