Appeasement is not on the agenda around the Korean peninsula. North Korea has indeed enshrined its status as a nuclear state in the Constitution, announced the country’s number 1, in a speech reported this Thursday morning by the official KCNA news agency.
“The DPRK’s nuclear force-building policy has become permanent as the basic law of the state,” Kim Jong-un said, using North Korea’s official acronym. He added, during a meeting of the People’s Assembly held Tuesday and Wednesday, “that no one is allowed to flout” the basic law of the state, according to KCNA.
Six nuclear tests between 2006 and 2017
A year ago, North Korea, which has already carried out six nuclear tests from 2006 to 2017, announced a new doctrine making its status as a nuclear power “irreversible”, and authorizing it to carry out a preventive atomic strike in case of existential threat against his regime.
By this time including the status of a nuclear state in the Constitution itself, the Assembly went even further, reducing the North’s hopes of denuclearization. “This is a historic event that provides powerful political leverage to remarkably strengthen national defense capabilities,” Kim Jong-un declared.
The North Korean leader also accused Washington, Seoul and Tokyo of having formed a “triangular military alliance” that “ultimately resulted in the emergence of an Asian version of NATO, the primary cause of war and assault “. It is, according to him, “the worst real threat, not threatening rhetoric or an imaginary entity”.
The peninsula “on the brink of nuclear war”
At the UN forum at the end of September, Pyongyang had already warned, through its ambassador to the United Nations, that the Korean peninsula was “on the verge of a nuclear war”, pointing the finger at American policy in Asia. Western observers fear that Pyongyang will carry out a new nuclear test. “If North Korea uses nuclear weapons, its regime will be stopped by an overwhelming response from the US-South Korean alliance,” warned South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.
Kim Jong-un’s recent week-long visit to Russia, his first abroad since the coronavirus pandemic, has further revived Western fears that Moscow and Pyongyang will defy sanctions and strike an arms deal. The Kremlin would be interested in purchasing North Korean munitions to continue the fighting in Ukraine, while Pyongyang would like Russia’s help to develop its missile program, condemned by the international community.