A North Korean nuclear test “could happen at any moment”. These are the alarms and also the promises that keep ringing out from Washington to Pyongyang. The US is closely monitoring the possibility of a nuclear test by North Korea and will launch a “robust” response if it does. The alarm bell was already ringing last month: during his visit to East Asia, US President Joe Biden feared that the nuclear threat could materialize.
However, Pyongyang continues to observe a silence that has lasted since 2017 and only participates in the launches of short-range ballistic missiles (the last eight on June 5): Since the beginning of the year, North Korea has also been testing hypersonic ballistic missiles as short-, medium- and long-range.
North Korea will increase nuclear weapons
Pyongyang is therefore prepared for a nuclear detonation. And this is probably one of the issues raised by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who on June 8 opened the negotiations of the fifth plenary session of the North Korean Workers’ Party Central Committee.
According to reports from North Korean state media, the political rendezvous will serve to make decisions on “a number of important issues” of economic and foreign policy for the coming year. The meeting, which comes at a time of the greatest tension in the peninsula since 2017, when the regime is ready to conduct a new nuclear test and a Covid wave hitting the country, could be the prelude to the announcement of a new success of its the program nuclear. In retrospect, shortly before the 2017 nuclear test, the Labor Party had held a meeting to approve the implementation plan for hydrogen bomb tests.
Within range of North Korean missiles
Not only the United States, but also Japan and South Korea are watching closely what the North Koreans are doing for fear of being the safe target of Kim Jong Un’s missiles. To send a signal of power, Washington and Seoul conducted a joint air exercise involving 20 warplanes, including radar-invisible F-35A stealth fighters, over the Yellow Sea in response to Pyongyang’s launch of eight missiles.
However, the hypothesis of the seventh nuclear blast may soon become concrete following the recent reopening of the Punggye-ri nuclear power plant five years after it was closed. Inter-Korean relations remain cold while denuclearization talks with the United States have stalled.
Nevertheless, Joe Biden’s government wants to seek dialogue with North Korea. The United States only considers easing sanctions if full denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula is achieved. A request that Pyongyang denied to the sender.
The cost of the nuclear program
North Korea wants to follow a path that has already been mapped out and intensify tensions in the Asian region. Upping the ante and taking stock of North Korean activity, United States special envoy to North Korea Sung Kim, from the Indonesian capital Jakarta, said there were 33 missile launches this year compared to 25 in 2019, the record year for North Korea’s missile operations. “And it’s only June,” Kim told reporters, without commenting on the international sanctions that are bringing the country’s economy to its knees.
Pyongyang spares no expense in developing its nuclear program. North Korea’s propaganda machine has for decades justified massive military spending as a useful tool to thwart a US invasion and preserve its people’s culture.
The Kim regime has spent between $400 million and $650 million to build and test this year’s 33 missiles, according to the latest data from the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, a military research center affiliated with the South Korean government. Also, an ICBM costs the Kim regime about $30 million.
The short-range ballistic missiles tested by North Korea, on the other hand, cost $5 million each, about half the estimated cost of what Russia spends on its missiles.
It is a rich portfolio that funds the development of North Korea’s arsenal. Just recently, Pyongyang unveiled a new jewel, the Hwasong-17 ICBM, which North Korea says it launched last March, although the expert community has many doubts about it.
The North Korean Missile Launch Bluff
International sanctions and the vote of China and Russia
This crazy spending clashes with the country’s economic conditions. North Korea’s economy, hit by international sanctions, is weaker now than it was a decade ago when Kim took power, South Korea’s Bank of Korea estimates. The United Nations World Food Program, which has been active in North Korea for years, estimates that around 40 percent of the North Korean population is malnourished, while “food insecurity and malnutrition are widespread”.
Frequent North Korean missile tests have prompted the international community to impose sanctions on North Korea and condemn missile activities. Last month, China and Russia vetoed a draft United Nations Security Council resolution introducing new sanctions against North Korea for repeated violations of the missile test ban.
It is the first time since 2006 that the international front against North Korea has been divided. A split that must be read when considering the anti-Western and anti-American narrative linking Russia and China during the war in Ukraine. Beijing and Moscow defended their decision by pointing the finger at Washington: For Pyongyang’s two neighboring allies, US sanctions would have increased tensions on the Korean peninsula and eliminated any possibility of dialogue between Kim Jong Un and President Joe Biden.
The UN Security Council unanimously imposed sanctions on North Korea after the first nuclear test in 2006 and has steadily tightened them over the years, passing a total of ten resolutions aimed at curbing North Korea’s nuclear development program. So far without much success and everything, according to the Russian and Chinese narrative, depends only on the United States.