SEOUL — North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un pledged to expand his country’s nuclear capabilities against rival South Korea “exponentially,” indicating he would escalate its military weakness in the new year despite sanctions from the country. abroad and economic misery. At home.
At a five-day rally of the ruling Workers’ Party that ended Saturday in Pyongyang, Mr. Kim calls for mass production of short-range missiles that can be used against South Korea and the construction of a new intercontinental ballistic missile. aimed at the United States, the North’s official Korean Central News Agency said Sunday.
Mr. Kim lost little time demonstrating his intentions. North Korea kicked off the new year by firing a short-range ballistic missile on Sunday after launching three similar missiles on New Year’s Eve. Mr Kim said the missiles were capable of firing nuclear warheads anywhere in South Korea, which he said has become the North’s “undoubted enemy” under the new conservative president, Yoon Suk Yeol.
Speaking at the party rally, Mr. Kim said Mr. Yoon’s government was forcing North Korea to switch to “a mass production of tactical nuclear weapons” and “an exponential increase in the country’s nuclear arsenal” as a “key orientation”. of its nuclear policy for 2023.
Since Mr. Yoon took office in May, South Korea has taken a harder line to the north, calling North Korea its “main enemy.” When North Korea sent drones over the inter-Korean border last week, Mr. Yoon “retaliated” and called for “war preparations”, ordering the South’s military to send its own drones into North Korean airspace. His attitude was a sharp departure from his predecessor, Moon Jae-in, who had made easing tensions and “preventing war” on the Korean peninsula a hallmark of his foreign policy.
North Korea will “respond with nuclear bomb for nuclear bomb, and all-out confrontation for all-out confrontation, to confront the enemy’s rash actions and reckless actions,” Kim said on Saturday.
North Korean missile tests
The Ministry of Defense of the South warned on Sunday that Mr. Kim “will come to his end” if it tries to use its nuclear weapons. “It must realize that the only way to improve the lives of its people is through denuclearization,” the ministry said in a statement.
Mr Kim’s threats come at a difficult time for the North Korean economy, which has been ravaged by the pandemic and years of international sanctions. Mr. Kim has warned of food shortages after extensive flooding has affected agricultural production in recent years. The market value of the North Korean currency against the US dollar nearly halved last year, while prices of rice and fuel rose sharply, according to news outlets in Seoul that track the North Korean economy.
Mr. Kim seems to view the nuclear arsenal as the best tool he has to elevate his leadership credentials among his people, constantly warning them that the North is threatened by the United States and its allies, analysts say. By expanding the arsenal, Kim also hoped to convince Washington and its allies that since sanctions weren’t working to stop his nuclear weapons ambitions, they should return to the negotiating table with concessions, they said.
“Kim Jong-un had little to show his people economically,” said Yang Moo-jin, president of the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul. “So he highlighted his achievements on the military front at the party rally.”
North Korea launched more missiles in 2022 than in any previous year. Mr. Kim’s threat to expand his nuclear arsenal in the new year, while not unexpected, has led to heightened tensions on the Korean peninsula as Mr. Yoon would not shy away from confronting the north, said Lee Byong-chul, a North Korean expert at the Institute for Far Eastern Studies at Kyungnam University in Seoul.
“It pays for Yoon politically to crack down on the North because it could help his party consolidate Conservative votes ahead of parliamentary elections,” Lee said in early 2014.
Mr. Kim became more determined to expand his nuclear arsenal after his negotiations with then-President Trump failed to lift the sanctions. That determination increased after Mr. Yoon took office in South Korea last year.
Mr. Kim’s failed diplomacy with Mr. Trump convinced him that “regardless of which party took power in Washington, the United States had no intention of negotiating with North Korea” and that “securing a strong nuclear power is the only way for the North to cope with its pressure and threat,” Chung Sung-Yoon, a research fellow at the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul, said in a paper last month.
Following the breakdown of Mr Kim’s negotiations with Mr Trump in 2019, North Korean diplomats who advocated dialogue with Washington have been sidelined and replaced by hardliners who advocated a “power-for-power” confrontation, according to analysts.
Last year, North Korea ended its self-imposed moratorium on ICBM testing and in November launched the Hwasong-17, its newest and most powerful ICBM. At the party meeting last week, Mr. Kim instructed his government to “develop another ICBM system whose main mission is a rapid nuclear counterattack,” the North said. Last month, the province ground-tested a new rocket engine that outside analysts said would be used to develop a new generation of solid fuel ICBMs that will launch faster than current liquid fuel. ICBMs.
North Korea first conducted ICBM tests in 2017. But after the talks of Mr. Kim with mr. Trump has failed, North Korea has stepped up pressure on the South by testing a series of short-range ballistic missiles it said could fire nuclear warheads at South Korean targets. . In recent months, it has also escalated tensions by flying a fleet of warplanes and firing artillery and missiles near inter-Korean land and sea borders.
“In the past, the North tended to focus its pressure on the United States, rejecting Seoul and preferring direct dialogue with Washington,” said Mr. Yang, the analyst at the University of North Korea. Studies. “But this time Kim Jong-un seems to be focusing on pressuring South Korea and raising tensions on the Korean peninsula as an indirect way to force Washington’s hand.”
For months, the United States and South Korea have warned that North Korea could conduct a nuclear test at any time, the seventh.
There were few signs of de-escalation, with the United States and its allies pledging to step up their joint military exercises around Korea to deter the North.
The Biden administration has been preoccupied with the war in Ukraine and has shown little desire to begin another round of negotiations with the north. Neither does Mr. Yoon’s government in Seoul.
Days after the North tested a new solid-fuel rocket engine last month, South Korea tested its own solid-fuel rocket engine. Rising tensions between Washington and Beijing and Moscow have given Mr. Kim more room to test more weapons with impunity.
“With Kim disavowing diplomacy and threatening mass production of nuclear weapons, the Yoon administration is likely to further enhance South Korea’s defense capabilities and readiness,” said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor of international studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul. . “If China doesn’t want the regional instability of an inter-Korean arms race on its doorstep, it will have to do more to contain Pyongyang in 2023.”