... clearly no longer suit his son Kim Jong-un. Too much effort and money has been invested in nuclear missile capabilities, and these have too much symbolic and practical significance for Pyongyang today. We should remind that further amendments to the DPRK Constitution, promulgated in late September 2023, enshrined the country’s strategy aimed at intensifying the development of nuclear weapons to ensure “survival rights” and “war deterrence” amid North Korea’s escalating confrontation with the United States and its allies in Northeast Asia.
It is also clear that any new bilateral talks with Washington or Seoul will ...
... and terms of its use, mobilization, safe maintenance and protection, mass reinforcement, renewal, etc. The intended purpose of the new Act is clearly
defined
: “Publication of the policy in relation to the armed forces and the legal framework for DPRK’s use of nuclear weapons is aimed at preventing a fallible judgment between nuclear states and the misuse of nuclear weapons – ultimately, at radical reduction of the risk of nuclear war.” This document may claim the status of a nuclear doctrine, and it seems ...
... Peninsula have two main components. Today, the greatest emphasis is placed on North Korea’s nuclear crisis stemming from the North Korean leadership implementing their nuclear missile program in violation of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Yet there is another component, the inter-Korean crisis, with the Korean nation being split into two separate states for over 70 years. These crises are inter-related, but their mutual influence is not straightforward. Should Pyongyang ...
... non-proliferation multilateral regime. It joined the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1994, ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 2002, and became party to the Additional Protocol of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
in 2004
.
The DPRK began to pursue nuclear weapons in 1963, but their requests for help in this endeavor were denied by both China and the Soviet Union. Soviet scientists were sent in early to help North Korea develop peaceful nuclear energy. In 1985, North Korea ratified the NPT, but ...
... Following the Korean war (1950–1953) where the Soviets had been supporting North Korea, in 1961 the two states signed a bilateral agreement on “friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance.”
The USSR was instrumental in the development of the DPRK’s nuclear weapons program in the 1970s
. Then-leader of the DPRK Kim Il Sung visited the USSR twice – in 1984 and 1986 – to sign additional treaties on cooperation and trade. The Soviet Union has been North Korea’s biggest trade partner with a
trade ...
... nuclear programmes implemented by countries aspiring to join the “nuclear club” (South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, Libya, etc.). Voluntary or even forced “disarmament” of an established nuclear state has never been done. The renunciation of nuclear weapons by former Soviet states (Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus) can hardly be seen as a precedent for North Korea: in the early 1990s, it was a matter of the fate of the Soviet Union’s strategic legacy, not that of hard-won national nuclear ...
... South Korea. The only way for Pyongyang to safeguard itself against its external enemies and preserve sovereignty is to have nuclear weapons.
Alexey Arbatov:
U.S. Nuclear Warheads' Scary Modernization
The U.S., for its part, is trying to prevent the ... ... against any military presence of extra-regional forces in Northeast Asia and its build-up under the pretext of counteracting the DPRK’s missile and nuclear programmes.”
In effect, Russia and China explicitly called on Washington to leave Northeast Asia....
