Kim's speech came just a day after North Korea claimed it had launched a medium-range missile with a hypersonic warhead, which – if true – would give it a highly maneuverable weapon that can travel at low altitudes and speeds five times the speed of sound. Ideal for sending south and evading anti-missile systems. North Korea said on Friday it had tested another nuclear-capable underwater attack drone in response to joint exercises off the coast of South Korea.
The regime is known to make bombastic threats, but its rhetoric has become noticeably more aggressive in recent months, a worrying shift that some analysts say could lead it to justify the use of conventional or nuclear weapons against the south.
Now some North Korea observers are wondering: Is Kim preparing for war?
Two prominent scholars — He is not known for having extreme views — They warned last week that Kim's calculations have changed dramatically since the last time he sat down for nuclear negotiations, in 2019. They say US policymakers who expect “more of the same” from Kim are unprepared for the potentially dangerous actions he is now preparing to take.
“We should be alert to the possibility that Kim Jong Un has somehow figured out how to prepare and start some kind of military conflict and be able to get away with it,” said Siegfried Hecker, a famous American nuclear scientist who visited North Korea. North Korea on many occasions.
He and Robert Carlin, a former North Korea analyst for the CIA and a close reader of Pyongyang's propaganda, wrote the article warning that North Korea may be seriously moving toward war.
Shift in North Korea's strategy
There have been signs since 2022 that Pyongyang is reorienting its foreign relations priorities.
Kim indicated through his speeches that he seeks to strengthen relations with Russia and China – despite Pyongyang's complex relationship with both – and considered outreach to the United States futile.
Just this week, Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui visited Moscow, where her Russian hosts stressed their commitment to developing relations with North Korea “in all areas, including sensitive areas.”
As for relations with the United States, Kim said He passed a new nuclear law in 2022 and declared that “there will be absolutely no denuclearization, no negotiations and no bargaining chip for trade”, indicating that he would not return to the talks if nuclear disarmament was on the agenda.
Washington has repeatedly said it will meet North Korea “anywhere, anytime, and without preconditions.” But many experts agree that current US efforts to engage North Korea are not only ineffective, they are just a delay in the way while Pyongyang works to expand and modernize its nuclear arsenal.
“North Korea no longer sees any benefit in seeking talks with the United States, at least on the terms set by the Biden administration,” said Frank Aum, a senior expert on Northeast Asia at the US Institute of Peace.
Meanwhile, tensions are rising on the Korean Peninsula. South Korean President Yoon Suk-yul, who took office in 2022, has adopted a reciprocal approach, with his harsh rhetoric and displays of military force.
The United States and South Korea now conduct regular military exercises, and last year, the United States deployed a nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarine in South Korea for the first time since the 1980s. North Korea considers these moves hostile to its national security and uses them to justify its weapons and nuclear program.
“Washington and Seoul appear to believe that enhanced deterrence measures and other pressure tactics are sufficient to mitigate escalating tensions and contain any situation that might turn into a crisis,” Aum said. “But these pressure-based coercive measures…exacerbate the risks” and push North Korea to focus on developing its own deterrence capabilities.
The intensification of discourse is worrying
Against this backdrop, suggestions that North Korea is preparing for war began to appear regularly in 2023 in statements by high-level officials — including Kim, according to Hecker and Carlin.
They started in January last year, When Kim promised a year of “war mobilization preparations and strengthening of North Korea's actual war capability.”
The authors note that after the country's top military organization held an unusual number of meetings in the middle of last year, Kim called for “preparing for a revolutionary war in order to achieve” reunification.
Kim concluded the year by saying that “physical clashes can occur and escalate even due to a minor accidental factor” near the inter-Korean border. His powerful sister, Kim Yo Jong, emphasized this point by warning that North Korea “will launch an immediate military strike if the enemy carries out even a slight provocation.”
Experts say this is more than the usual threat.
“What we've observed now over the past year is just pushing things more and more in this military direction,” Hecker said.
In addition to its escalating rhetoric, Pyongyang is working to strengthen its military forces. Kim has pledged to expand his weapons arsenal in 2024 by launching new spy satellites, building military drones, and producing more nuclear materials.
After a year of weapons tests, North Korea on Sunday launched a missile it claimed was equipped with a hypersonic warhead and powered by solid-fuel engines.
Even if this is an exaggeration, the tangible progress the regime has made in other areas of missile technology over the past few years shows that North Korea has been able to achieve many of the ambitions it has indicated.
So what could all this mean?
The regime's fear of annihilation—if North Korea started a war, it would quickly feel the full force of the U.S. military response—has long preserved the fragile peace on the Korean peninsula. But Kim's calculations may change.
“The danger goes far beyond routine warnings in Washington, Seoul and Tokyo about Pyongyang's 'provocations,'” Hecker and Carlin say.
“Look, he's not suicidal,” Hecker said. “But what we don’t understand exactly is how he views this world he lives in now? How does he see the path to victory?
Experts widely acknowledge that there is a clear and growing risk of a potential military confrontation on the peninsula, even if unintended.
While Pyongyang almost certainly knows it will not survive an all-out nuclear war, it may find limited ways to use a nuclear weapon over the next decade to challenge the U.S.-South Korea alliance, according to a November study by the Atlantic Council. A think tank in Washington, with input from more than 100 experts and stakeholders.
The study found that Pyongyang's growing confidence in its nuclear deterrent may push it to find more escalation options, especially if it manages to anger Beijing and Washington.
However, some experts say fears of war are far-fetched.
North Korea has a record of strategically leveraging its military campaigns to win concessions from enemies, and inflammatory rhetoric helps instill a sense of national unity, said Lee Ho-ryong, a North Korean military expert at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyzes in Seoul.
“If the Kim regime was serious about preparing for war, it would stockpile its weapons and ammunition rather than send a large amount of it abroad.” [to Russia]”, He said to me.
Yang Moo-jin, president of the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, said North Korea still lags behind in conventional weapons capabilities and faces chronic shortages of basic resources such as food and fuel necessary to sustain the war.
North Korea has not yet received the full support of China and Russia to start a new war in the region, Yang said, adding that “destabilizing the Korean Peninsula is not necessarily in the interest of North Korea's allies, especially China.”
