That is the fundamental argument for South Koreans who want their country to develop its own nuclear weapons. It’s about the need to protect themselves from an aggressive northern neighbor that is already a nuclear power in all but name and whose leader Kim Jong Un has vowed an “exponential increase” in his arsenal.
The counter-argument, which has has long stopped Seoul from pursuing the bomb, lies in the likely consequences. Developing nukes would not only upset the country’s relationship with the United States, it would likely invite sanctions that could strangle Seoul’s access to nuclear power. And that is to say nothing of the regional arms race it would almost inevitably provoke.
But which side of the argument South Koreans find themselves on appears to be changing.
Ten years ago, calling for South Korean nuclear weapons was a fringe idea that garnered little serious coverage. Today it has become a mainstream discussion.
Recent opinion polls show a majority of South Koreans support their country having its own nuclear weapons program; a string of prominent academics who once shunned the idea have switched sides; even President Yoon Suk Yeol has floated the idea.
So what’s changed?
For supporters, Seoul developing its own nukes would finally answer the age-old question: “Would Washington risk San Francisco for Seoul in the event of nuclear war?”
At present, South Korea comes under Washington’s Extended Deterrence Strategy, which includes the nuclear umbrella, meaning the US is obligated to come to its aid in the event of attack.
For some, that is enough reassurance. But the details of exactly what form that “aid” might take aren’t entirely clear. As that age-old question points out, faced with the possibility of a retaliatory nuclear strike on US soil, Washington would have a compelling reason to limit its involvement.
Perhaps better not to ask the question then. As Cheong Seong-chang of the Sejong Institute puts it, “If South Korea has nuclear weapons, we can respond ourselves to North Korea’s attack, so there is no reason for the United States to get involved.”
There are other reasons for South Koreans to question their decades-old leap of faith in US protection, too. Looming large among them is Donald Trump. The former US president, citing the expense involved, made no secret of his desire to pull 28,500 US troops out of South Korea and questioned why the US had to protect the country. Given Trump has already announced his presidential bid for the 2024 election that’s an issue that still plays heavy on people’s minds.
“The US simply isn’t perceived to be as reliable as it once was,” Ankit Panda of Carnegie Endowment for Peace said. “Even if the Biden administration behaves like a traditional US administration and offers all the right reassurance signals to South Korea… policy makers will have to keep in the back of their mind the possibility of the US once again electing an administration that would have a different approach for South Korea.”
But the loss of faith goes beyond Trump.
More recently, President Yoon Suk Yeol floated the idea of US tactical nuclear weapons being redeployed to the peninsula or South Korea possessing “its own nuclear capabilities” if the North Korean threat intensifies. Washington’s rejection of both ideas has been conspicuous. When Yoon said this month that Seoul and Washington were discussing joint nuclear exercises President Joe Biden was asked the same day whether such discussions were indeed underway. He responded simply, “No.”
Following Yoon’s comments, US Defense Department Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder reiterated the US’ commitment to the Extended Deterrence Strategy, saying that “to date, (the strategy) has worked and it has worked very well.”
In a Chosun Ilbo newspaper interview published on January 2, Yoon said of these guarantees, “it’s difficult to convince our people with just that.”
But in another interview, with The Wall Street Journal on the sidelines of Davos last week, Yoon walked those comments back saying, “I’m fully confident about the US’ extended deterrence.”
An inconsistent message rarely soothes concerns on either side of the argument.
On Thursday, US think-tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), suggested what might seem a middle ground – the creation of “a framework for joint nuclear planning” that could “help to develop stronger bonds of trust between the allies in the current environment.”
It said this framework could be “similar to a NATO planning group for nuclear weapons use, with planning conducted bilaterally and trilaterally (with Japan) and control remaining in the hands of the United States.”
But the CSIS made clear it did not support “the deployment of US tactical nuclear weapons to the peninsula or condoning South Korea purchasing its own nuclear weapons.”
Other experts too, like Professor Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear non-proliferation expertat Middlebury Institute in California, see joint planning and exercises as “more realistic options than either nuclear weapons or nuclear sharing.”
For some in Yoon’s conservative party that is simply not enough. They see a nuclear-weapons-free South Korea being threatened by a nuclear-armed North Korea and want nothing less than US nukes redeployed to the Korean Peninsula.
They seem destined to be disappointed. Washington moved its tactical weapons out of South Korea in 1991 after decades of deployment and there are no signs it will consider reversing that decision.
“Putting US nukes back on the peninsula makes no military sense,” said Bruce Klingner of Heritage Foundation.
“They currently are on very hard to find, very hard to target weapons platforms and to take weapons off of them and put them into a bunker in South Korea, which is a very enticing target for North Korea, what you’ve done is you’ve degraded your capabilities.”
That leaves many South Koreans seeing just one option – and some are losing patience.
Cheong, a recent convert to South Korea acquiring the bomb, believes the Extended Deterrence Strategy has already reached its limit in dealing with North Korea and only a nuclear-armed South Korea can avert a war.
“Of course, North Korea does not want South Korea’s nuclear armament. Now they can ignore the South Korean military,” Cheong said.
“But they must be nervous, (because if South Korea decides to pursue the bomb) it has the nuclear material to make more than 4,000 nuclear weapons.”
Still, it’s not just fear of upsetting the relationship with the US that holds Seoul back from such a course. If South Korea were to leave the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) the effect on its domestic nuclear power system would likely be swift and devastating.
“First of all, the nuclear suppliers group would cut off fissile material to South Korea, which is reliant for all of its fissile material on outside suppliers. It could lead to international sanctions,” Klingner said.
Then there is the regional arms race it would likely provoke, with neighboring China making clear it will not tolerate such a build up.
“Probably China is going to be unhappy and it’ll basically stop at nothing to prevent South Korea from going nuclear,” said professor Andrei Lankov, long time North Korea expert from Kookmin University.
Given the likely fallout, Seoul might do better to take comfort in the guarantees already on offer from the US.
“The 28,500 US troops on the peninsula have a very real tripwire effect. In the event of a breakout of hostilities between the two Koreas, it is simply unavoidable for the US not to get involved. We have skin in the game,” Panda said.
Finally, there are also those cautioning that even if South Korea did acquire nuclear weapons, its problems would hardly disappear.
“So the funny thing about nuclear weapons is that your weapons don’t offset their weapons,” said Lewis at Middlebury Institute.
“Look at Israel. Israel is nuclear armed and is terrified of Iran getting nuclear weapons, so Israel’s nuclear weapons don’t in any fundamental way offset the threat they feel from Iran’s nuclear weapons.”
Continued deliveries of arms to Ukraine by its allies in the West will lead to retaliation with “more powerful weapons,” a top official in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime said on Sunday.
Vyacheslav Volodin, chairman of Russia’s lower house, the State Duma, threatened Europe and the U.S. with “global catastrophe” over their continued military support to the government in Kyiv, which is trying to continue retaking territory it lost in the Russian invasion.
Volodin directly invoked the use of nuclear weapons in his statement over messaging app Telegram.
“Arguments that the nuclear powers have not previously used weapons of mass destruction in local conflicts are untenable. This is because these states have not faced a situation in which the security of their citizens and the territorial integrity of their countries were threatened,” the Russian official wrote in his social media post.
The threat comes amid arguments over whether Germany will send Leopard 2 battle tanks to Ukraine to fight the Russian invasion. Kyiv has requested the German-made tanks, which it says it needs to renew its counteroffensive against Moscow’s forces. But Berlin has so far resisted the call from Ukraine and its allies to send the tanks without the U.S. making the first move, over fears of an escalation in the conflict.
Berlin also hasn’t approved deliveries of the tanks from its allies, as Germany gets a final say over any re-exports of the vehicles from countries that have purchased them.
Newly appointed German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius is planning a trip to Ukraine, which could come in the next month, German newspaper Bild, a sister publication of POLITICO in the Axel Springer Group, reported on Sunday, citing an interview. Asked about the Leopard tanks, Pistorius said: “We are in very close dialogue on this issue with our international partners, above all with the U.S.”
In his Telegram post, Russia’s Volodin said: “With their decisions, Washington and Brussels are leading the world to a terrible war … foreign politicians making such decisions need to understand that this could end in a global tragedy that will destroy their countries.”
It’s not the first time that top Russian politicians threaten a nuclear escalation. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has invoked the use of nuclear weapons more than once since the outbreak of the conflict 11 months ago.
As the United States prepares to announce a new shipment of military hardware for Ukraine and Kyiv pushes its Western partners for modern battle tanks and other heavy weapons, Moscow responded Thursday with a familiar battery of threats. Once again, Russia alluded to its nuclear arsenal in a bid to dissuade the U.S. and its NATO allies from helping Ukraine resist the full-scale invasion President Vladimir Putin launched almost 11 months ago.
“It never occurs to any of the lowlifes to draw an elementary conclusion from this: The defeat of a nuclear power in a conventional war can trigger a nuclear war,” former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, a top Putin ally who now serves as deputy chairman of the Security Council, said in a post on Telegram.
“Nuclear powers have not lost major conflicts on which their fate depended,” added Medvedev, whose rhetoric has grown increasingly bellicose over the course of the nearly a year-long war.
When asked whether Medvedev’s eyebrow-raising statement represented an escalation of the conflict in Ukraine or Russia’s broader standoff with the West, the Kremlin’s top spokesman said Thursday that the remarks were in line with Russia’s nuclear doctrine.
“There are no contradictions there,” presidential spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said.
Striking an eerily similar note, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church professed in a Thursday sermon that “an attempt to destroy Russia would mean the end of the world.”
“Today there are very big threats to the world, to our country, and to the whole human race, because some crazy people had the idea that the great Russian power, possessing powerful weapons, inhabited by very strong people… who have always come out victorious, that they can be defeated,” said Patriarch Kirill, a staunch backer of all Kremlin policy.
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends Orthodox Easter mass led by Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill at the Christ The Saviour Cathedral on April 24, 2022, in Moscow.
Getty
In Washington, State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said the latest comments were consistent with Russia’s previous statements regarding the use of nuclear weapons.
“This is not the first time that we have seen such kind of rhetoric from Russia broadly … We think provocative rhetoric regarding nuclear weapons is not only dangerous, it is reckless, adds to the risk of miscalculation and candidly it should be avoided,” Patel said. “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
This week, Russian authorities put on a show of force. Putin gave orders to expand the Russian army by around 300,000 people, which would see the number of serving soldiers swell to 1.5 million over the next three years. He also ordered a new army corps and two military districts to be established near European borders.
Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu later laid out an ambitious plan for these changes, saying new military structures would be created around Moscow, St. Petersburg and Karelia. The last location is right on the border with Finland, a Nordic nation that is in the process of becoming a NATO member.
“Self-sufficient” units were also to be deployed to the Ukrainian territories that Russia illegally annexed, Shogui said, despite the Russian military not fully controlling those areas.
“Ensuring the military security of the state, protection of the new federal subjects and critical facilities of the Russian Federation can only be guaranteed by strengthening the key structural components of the Armed Forces,” Shoigu said, according to state-run news agency RIA Novosti.
The Kremlin called the planned military expansion a response to “the proxy war” it claims the West is waging against Russia in Ukraine — a claim Moscow has long wielded to justify its brutal invasion.
Some analysts have noted that the changes announced this week — especially breaking the current, single Western Military District into several smaller ones — in some ways represent a step into the past.
“Shoigu’s announcements since December have been a little surreal to see. In most cases, the posture changes are returning to the past (pre-2010 era), not a step forward,” said Dara Massicot, a senior policy researcher at RAND Corporation. “[His] statements of more billets and more divisions will need more people and equipment to populate them (even if they fall short of targets). This is a tall order to achieve by 2026 without major changes to the Russian economy and personnel system.”
On Wednesday, Putin toured a defense enterprise, the Obukhovsky Plant in St. Petersburg, which has been placed under U.S. sanctions, to praise efforts to increase the output of weaponry and heavy machinery.
Russia has lost a significant amount of equipment that has been either destroyed, captured by Ukraine or abandoned by retreating Russian soldiers over the last 11 months. Independent Russian and international media outlets have also reported in detail on the myriad cases when poorly equipped Russian soldiers ended up on the front line, pointing towards production difficulties in the country’s military-industrial complex.
Putin told workers at the plant that Russia was justified in calling Ukraine a country full of “neo-Nazis,” and he insisted that victory was “inevitable.”
Editor’s Note: A version of this story appears in today’s Meanwhile in the Middle East newsletter, CNN’s three-times-a-week look inside the region’s biggest stories. Sign up here.
New York and Amman CNN
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The Islamic Republic of Iran has long ranked among the world’s top executioners. But with the recent death sentences handed down to protesters, critics say the regime has taken capital punishment to a new level.
Last weekend, Iran executed two more protesters charged with killing security personnel, causing an international outcry. Critics said that the executions were a result of hasty sham trials.
The regime executed 314 people in 2021, 20% more than the previous year, rights group Amnesty International said in a report from May 2022. Many of those had to do with drug-related crimes.
This year, a number of protesters are entangled in Iran’s court system, many of whom face a particularly unjust judicial process, according to activists.
Human rights activists have warned there’s a real risk that many of them could become another number in the growing list of those executed by the Islamic Republic. At least 43 people are currently facing execution in Iran, according to a CNN count, but activist group 1500Tasvir says the number could be as high as 100.
“Defendants are systematically deprived of access to lawyers of their choice during the trial, are subjected to tortured and coerced confessions and then rushed to the gallows,” Tara Sepehri Far, an Iran researcher at Human Rights Watch, told CNN.
United Nations human rights chief Volker Türk on Tuesday accused Iran of “weaponizing” criminal procedures, saying it amounts to “state sanctioned killing”
With this round of protests, critics say, the authorities are using charges that carry the death penalty more liberally than they have before, widening the application of such laws to cover protesters.
According to Iranian state media, dozens of government agents, from security officials to officers of the basij paramilitary force, have been killed in the protests. Activist groups HRANA and Iran Human Rights say that 481 protesters have been killed.
Security personnel have died in previous protests as well, Sepehri Far said, “but it is crucial to point out in this (time) round Iranian authorities are using the death penalty way beyond (the) intentional killing of security officers.”
The regime appears to have capitalized on the executions, using them as a deterrent to people eager to speak out and flood the streets, as was seen after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Jina Amini in the custody of the nation’s morality police.
“The trials and executions are yet another piece of the repression machine serving to demonstrate power and control and spread fear and publicize (the) government’s narrative about protesters,” Sepehri Far explained.
Iran has used Islamic Sharia law to prosecute protesters with crimes carrying the death penalty, namely “waging war against God” or “moharebeh” and “corruption on earth,” according to the UN Office of Human Rights.
The process has been criticized within the country too.
Mohsen Borhani, a professor at Tehran University and an expert in Islamic jurisprudence, has also challenged the use of such religiously based charges against protesters. In a television debate last month, he argued that the protesters executed were charged with waging war against God when their role in the protests did not in fact merit such a charge.
The brandishing of weapons by protesters, he said, was meant to intimidate, not injure security personnel. “This is fundamentally out of the realm of moharebeh because the person’s opposition is towards the government, not civilians.”
Sepehri Far said that Mohsen Shekari, one of the first protesters to be executed, was accused of injuring an officer. “Others have received the death penalty for extremely vague charges such as destruction and arson of public property or using a weapon to spread terror,” she said.
Activists say Iranian authorities have developed sophisticated methods of spreading disinformation on how, why and when executions will be carried out. Civil rights activist Atena Daemi said in a tweet, for example, that several Iranian news outlets had reported that activists on death row had been released, news that was refuted by the prisoners’ families.
Activists have said that condemning the protests is not enough. The European Union has taken note, and as the bloc continues to discuss imposing a fourth round of sanctions on Iran, some members have supported moves to classify its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization.
Saudi Arabia to lift restrictions on pilgrim numbers for 2023 Hajj season
Saudi Arabia aims to host a pre-pandemic number of Muslim pilgrims for the Hajj in 2023, the Saudi Ministry of Hajj and Umrah said in a tweet on Monday. No age limits will be imposed on Hajj pilgrims this season, which starts on June 26.
Background: The kingdom had limited the number of pilgrims to 1,000 in 2020 and in 2021 increased the quota to almost 60,000, but only for residents of Saudi Arabia. In 2022, the kingdom authorized one million Muslims to perform the rites. The holy sites in the cities of Mecca and Medina normally host over 2 million people during the pilgrimage.
Why it matters: Performing the Hajj is one of the five pillars of Islam which all able-bodied Muslims are required to perform at least once in their lives. Saudi Arabia has identified the pilgrimage as a key component of a plan to diversify its economy. According to Mastercard’s latest Global Destination Cities Index, Mecca attracted $20 billion in tourist dollars in 2018.
Egypt commits to IMF to slow projects, increase fuel prices
Egypt committed to a flexible currency, a greater role for the private sector and a range of monetary and fiscal reforms when it agreed to a $3 billion financial support package with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Reuters reported, citing an IMF staff report released on Tuesday. Among its pledges is one to slow investment in public projects, including national projects, so as to reduce inflation and conserve foreign currency, without specifying where cuts might fall. Egypt also said it would allow most fuel product prices to rise until they were in line with the country’s fuel index mechanism to make up for a slowdown in such increases over the last fiscal year.
Background: In a letter of intent to the IMF, Egypt said it sought support after the war in Ukraine increased existing vulnerabilities amid tighter global financial conditions and higher commodity prices. Under the support, the IMF will provide Egypt with about $700 million in the fiscal year that ends in June.
Why it matters: Egypt is already suffering from economic hardship and rising inflation that has caused discontent at home. The 2011 revolution was partly triggered by economic matters and the cost of living.
Saudi Arabia plans to use domestic uranium for nuclear fuel
Saudi Arabia plans to use domestically-sourced uranium to build up its nuclear power industry, Reuters cited Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman as saying on Wednesday. He added that recent exploration had shown a diverse portfolio of uranium.
Background: Saudi Arabia has a nascent nuclear program that it wants to expand to eventually include uranium enrichment, a sensitive area given its role in nuclear weapons. Riyadh has said it wants to use nuclear power to diversify its energy mix.
Why it matters: Atomic reactors need uranium enriched to around 5% purity, but the same technology in this process can also be used to enrich the heavy metal to higher, weapons-grade levels. This issue has been at the heart of Western and regional concerns about Iran’s nuclear program. It is unclear where Saudi Arabia’s ambitions end, since Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said in 2018 that the kingdom would develop nuclear weapons if Iran did. The neighboring United Arab Emirates has committed not to enrich uranium itself and not to reprocess spent fuel.
German exports to Iran rose by 12.7% last year, Reuters reported. Despite a significant deterioration in political ties between the two countries due to Iran’s brutal crackdown on protesters, trade ties remained intact, with the value of trade climbing to $1.6 billion between January and November. Berlin is currently pushing for a fourth package of European Union sanctions on Iran.
The Gulf nation of Oman become the latest in the small group of countries that are considering a move to a four-day workweek.
The government has said that it is studying the possibility of expanding weekends to three days instead of two, citing other nations’ success in pilots to test the move.
Salem bin Muslim Al Busaidi, an undersecretary at the labor ministry, told local media that the nation’s workforce has already increased flexibility, adopting remote work, part-time work and other initiatives to modernize the work environment.
Several countries have experimented with a four-day work week, including Iceland, Spain and Ireland, and the trials suggest that the move improves productivity.
Oman’s neighbor, the UAE, has seen some of the most dramatic changes to the country’s work environment. Besides shifting the country’s weekend to Saturday and Sunday instead of Friday and Saturday, the country adopted a four-and-a-half-day workweek in 2022.
The UAE emirate of Sharjah took that a step further by adopting a four-day work week across all government sectors and allowing private companies to do the same.
The emirate reported a 40% drop in traffic accidents in the first 8 months, a boost in employee productivity, and a drop in gas emissions due to the decrease in commutes, according to local media.
The onset of Covid-19 drastically changed the working environment of the Gulf region as companies were forced to adapt to new ways of working under restrictions.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un vowed Sunday to “exponentially” increase the number of nuclear weapons in his country and further advance his antagonistic intercontinental ballistic missile program.
Kim delivered the message after a meeting of his ruling party this weekend, declaring South Korea the country’s “undoubted enemy” and amping up his aggressive posture amid a slate of recent missile launches that will likely set the tone for the year. North Korea followed up those statements with a test of short-range ballistic missiles on New Year’s Day that Kim said could reach anywhere in South Korea.
The efforts are largely seen as an attempt by Kim to force the international community to negotiate with North Korea and offer legitimacy to his government. The country is still subject to harsh economic and diplomatic sanctions and has been deeply impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol responded to the threat this weekend with a firm statement of his own, saying Seoul would punish any provocations to prevent a war on the peninsula. Yoon has taken a much harder line on the North than his predecessor, Moon Jae-in, calling the South’s northern neighbor a “principal enemy.”
A TV screen shows footage of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during a news program at the Yongsan Railway Station in Seoul. Kim stressed the need to “exponentially” increase the number of the country’s nuclear arsenal and develop a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in the new year, Pyongyang’s state media reported on Jan. 1.
SOPA Images via Getty Images
“Our military should certainly punish any enemy provocations with a firm determination not to avoid going to war,” Yoon said, per Yonhap News. “I call on you to bear in mind that our troops’ firm mental readiness posture and realistic training can only guarantee strong security.”
North Korea fired about 70 ballistic missiles in 2022, Yonhap reported, the most in a single year. Speculation has grown that the country could conduct a nuclear test in the coming months, what would be its first in years and a guaranteed uptick in international tensions.
“As we greet the New Year, we urge North Korea to come out onto a path for peace on the Korean Peninsula and common prosperity for Koreans rather than sticking to a wrong path,” the South Korean military said in a statement Monday.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ordered the “exponential” expansion of his country’s nuclear arsenal and the development of a more powerful intercontinental ballistic missile, state media reported Sunday, after he entered 2023 with another weapons launch following a record number of testing activities last year.
Kim’s moves are in line with the broad direction of his nuclear program. He has repeatedly vowed to boost both the quality and quantity of his arsenal to cope with what he calls U.S. hostility. Some experts say Kim’s push to produce more nuclear and other weapons signals his intention to continue a run of weapons tests and ultimately solidify his future negotiating power and win greater outside concessions.
“They are now keen on isolating and stifling (North Korea), unprecedented in human history,” Kim said at a recently ended key ruling party meeting, according to the official Korean Central News Agency. “The prevailing situation calls for making redoubled efforts to overwhelmingly beef up the military muscle.”
During the six-day meeting meant to determine new state objectives, Kim called for “an exponential increase of the country’s nuclear arsenal” to mass produce battlefield tactical nuclear weapons targeting South Korea. He also presented a task to develop a new ICBM missioned with a “quick nuclear counterstrike” capability — a weapon he needs to strike the mainland U.S. He said the North’s first military reconnaissance satellite will be launched “at the earliest date possible,” KCNA said.
“Kim’s comments from the party meeting reads like an ambitious — but perhaps achievable — New Year’s resolution list,” said Soo Kim, a security analyst at the California-based RAND Corporation. “It’s ambitious in that Kim consciously chose to spell out what he hopes to accomplish as we head into 2023, but it also suggests a dose of confidence on Kim’s part.”
Last month, North Korea claimed to have performed key tests needed for the development of a new strategic weapon, a likely reference to a solid-fueled ICBM, and a spy satellite.
Kim’s identification of South Korea as an enemy and the mention of hostile U.S. and South Korean policies is “a reliable pretext for the regime to produce more missiles and weapons to solidify Kim’s negotiating position and concretize North Korea’s status as a nuclear weapons power,” Soo Kim said.
Later Sunday, South Korea’s Defense Ministry reiterated a warning that any attempt to use nuclear weapons by North Korea “will lead to the end of the Kim Jong Un government.” The U.S. military has previously made similar warnings.
“The new year started but our security situation is still very grave,” South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol told top military officers during a video conference. “Our military must resolutely punish any provocation by the enemy with a firm determination that we dare to risk fighting a battle.”
Senior diplomats from South Korea, the U.S. and Japan spoke by phone and agreed that provocations by North Korea would only deepen its international isolation and prompt their trilateral security cooperation. They still reaffirmed that the door to dialogue with North Korea remains open, according to the South Korean Foreign Ministry.
Since his high-stakes summitry with then-President Donald Trump collapsed in 2019 due to wrangling over U.S.-led sanctions, Kim Jong Un has refused to return to talks with Washington and taken steps to enlarge his arsenal. Some observers say Kim would eventually want to make North Korea a legitimate nuclear power so as to win the lifting of international sanctions and the end of the regular U.S.-South Korean military drills that he views as a major security threat.
“It was during his 2018 New Year’s speech that (Kim) first ordered the mass production of warheads and ballistic missiles, and he’s doubling down on that quantitative expansion goal in the coming year,” said Ankit Panda, an expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Panda said the reference to a new ICBM appears to concern a solid-propellant system, which could be tested soon. He said a satellite launch could take place in April, a month that includes a key state anniversary.
Worries about North Korea’s nuclear program have grown since the North last year approved a new law that authorized the preemptive use of nuclear weapons in a broad range of situations and openly threatened to use its nuclear weapons first. During last week’s party meeting, Kim reiterated that threat.
Earlier Sunday, South Korea’s military detected a short-range ballistic missile launched from the North’s capital region. It said the weapon traveled about 400 kilometers (250 miles) before falling into the water between the Korean Peninsula and Japan. The U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said that the U.S. commitments to defend South Korea and Japan “remain ironclad.”
North Korea test-fired more than 70 missiles last year, including three short-range ballistic missiles detected by South Korea on Saturday. The testing spree indicates the country is likely emboldened by its advancing nuclear program. Observers say the North was also able to continue its banned missile tests because China and Russia have blocked the U.S. and others from toughening U.N. sanctions at the Security Council.
KCNA confirmed Sunday that the country conducted the test-firings of its super-large multiple rocket launcher on Saturday and Sunday. Kim Jong Un said the rocket launcher puts all of South Korea within striking distance and is capable of carrying a tactical nuclear warhead, according to KCNA.
“Its recent missile launches were not technically impressive. Instead, the high volume of tests at unusual times and from various locations demonstrate that North Korea could launch different types of attack, anytime, and from many directions,” said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul.
Animosities between the rival Koreas have further deepened since early last week, when South Korea accused North Korea of flying drones across their heavily fortified border for the first time in five years and responded by sending its own drones toward the North.
ISLAMABAD — Pakistan and neighboring India exchanged lists of their nuclear facilities on Sunday as part of a 1988 pact that bars them from attacking each other’s nuclear installations, according to official statements from both sides.
Pakistan and India have had strained relations since their independence from colonial British rule in 1947 over the Himalayan region of Kashmir.
They have fought three wars, built up their armies and developed nuclear weapons. India conducted its first nuclear test in 1974, with Pakistan carrying out its first test in 1988.
The lists were simultaneously handed over through their respective diplomats in Islamabad and New Delhi.
India and Pakistan also exchanged lists of prisoners in each other’s custody as part of an agreement dating back to 2008.
Pakistan shared a list of 705 detained Indians, 51 civilians and 654 fishermen. India shared a list of 434 Pakistanis in its custody, 339 civilians and 95 fishermen.
India and Pakistan arrest each other’s fishermen for crossing the unmarked sea frontier between them. Their maritime security agencies seize the boats and jail the fishermen, who are usually only released after the two countries hold negotiations. Normally they spend years behind bars with no formal trial.
The 2008 agreement gives each side consular access to prisoners and requires them to exchange lists of prisoners in each other’s custody each January and July.
Pakistan separately also sought consular access to its missing defense personnel from wars in 1965 and 1971 and special consular access to another 56 civilian prisoners.
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Associated Press writer Ashok Sharma contributed from New Delhi.
Japan’s Coast Guard said the missiles splashed down in the Sea of Japan, according to Japanese media reports.
North Korea has reportedly fired two ballistic missiles towards the Sea of Japan, the latest launches in a year that has seen an unprecedented barrage of missile tests by an increasingly belligerent Pyongyang.
Japan’s Coast Guard said the first ballistic missile was fired on Saturday morning shortly after 08:00am local time (23:00 GMT) and the second was launched at approximately 08:16am (23:16 GMT), The Japan Times reported.
The missiles splashed down in the Sea of Japan but outside Japan’s exclusive economic zone – a body of water that extends approximately 370km (200 nautical miles) from the country’s coastline, according to the news organisation.
North Korea fired off at least two apparent ballistic missiles on Saturday, the final day of 2022, after a record-breaking year of launches. https://t.co/jHx3rdRihR
South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff confirmed the first missile launch by North Korea but gave no further details, such as the specific type of weapon or the distance the missile had travelled.
The launches on Saturday add to North Korea’s tally of about 70 ballistic missiles – including some eight intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) – fired throughout the year, the most ever by the nuclear-armed Pyongyang which has officially announced plans to modernise its military capabilities in response to what it says is provocation by South Korea and its key ally, the United States.
Saturday’s launch also comes just days after North Korea allegedly flew drones into South Korea’s airspace for the first time since 2017, prompting Seoul to deploy fighter jets and helicopters to shoot down the unmanned aerial vehicles.
South Korea’s military later apologised for failing to shoot down the drones and the country’s President Yoon Suk Yeol has since called for stronger air defences and high-tech stealth drones to better monitor North Korea.
On day two of the meeting on Wednesday, Kim reviewed the “newly created challenging situation” on the Korean Peninsula and the broader political landscapes, according to the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
Kim also set the direction for the “anti-enemy struggle” and goals for reinforcing self-defence in 2023, KCNA reported, according to South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency.
“He specified the principles of foreign affairs and the direction of the struggle against the enemy that our party and government must thoroughly abide by in order to protect sovereign rights and defend national interests,” KCNA reported.
“New core goals for strengthening self-defensive capabilities to be strongly pursued in 2023 have been presented in preparation for diverse fluctuations in the political situation,” North Korea’s official news agency added.
KCNA did not provide details on the self-defence goals but Kim’s remarks indicate he may continue to accelerate and expand the country’s military capabilities.
The high-level meeting in Pyongyang is being held amid a sharp rise in tension on the Korean Peninsula after a year of unprecedented North Korean weapons tests, large-scale military exercises between South Korean and United States forces, and North Korean drones crossing into South Korea on Monday, prompting Seoul to scramble fighter jets and attack helicopters in a failed bid to shoot them down.
This year saw Pyongyang launching scores of ballistic missiles, with many of the launches designed to test and develop “top priority” strategic weapons under a five-year plan laid out at the Workers’ Party congress in early 2021.
During the plenary meeting, Kim also pointed out “a series of serious shortcomings” in such areas as science, education and health this year, suggested ways to overcome them and raised key tasks for next year, KCNA said.
The economy is also high on the agenda, with Kim facing mounting pressure from international sanctions, the fallout from a nationwide COVID-19 lockdown and natural disasters.
The meeting will continue for a third day on Thursday, the Yonhap News Agency reported.
In 2020, North Korea conducted four missile tests. In 2021, it doubled that number. In 2022, the isolated nation fired more missiles than any other year on record, at one point launching 23 missiles in a single day.
North Korea has fired more than 90 cruise and ballistic missiles so far this year, showing off a range of weapons as experts warn of a potential nuclear test on the horizon.
Though the tests themselves aren’t new, their sheer frequency marks a significant escalation that has put the Pacific region on edge.
“The big thing about 2022 is that the word ‘test’ is no longer appropriate to talk about most North Korean missile launches – they are hardly testing missiles these days,” said Ankit Panda, a nuclear policy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Everything we’ve seen this year suggests that Kim Jong Un is dead serious about using nuclear capabilities early in a conflict if necessary.”
The attention-grabbing tests also threaten to set off an arms race in Asia, with nearby countries building up their militaries, and the United States promising to defend South Korea and Japan by the “full range of capabilities, including nuclear.”
Here’s a look back at a year of weaponry and warnings – and what could come next.
Of the more than 270 missile launches and nuclear tests by North Korea since 1984, more than a quarter came this year, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Missile Defense Project.
Of that total, more than three quarters were recorded after Kim Jong Un came to power in 2011, reflecting the dictator’s ambitions – of which he made no secret, vowing in April to develop the country’s nuclear forces at the “highest possible” speed.
That lofty goal was reflected in a flurry of testing, with North Korea firing missiles on 36 days this year, according to a CNN count.
“For missiles, they set daily, monthly and yearly records,” said Bruce Klingner, senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center.
The majority of these tests were cruise and ballistic missiles. Cruise missiles stay inside the Earth’s atmosphere and are maneuverable with control surfaces, like an airplane, while ballistic missiles glide through space before reentering the atmosphere.
Pyongyang has also fired surface-to-air missiles and hypersonic missiles.
“North Korea is literally turning into a prominent operator of large scale missile forces,” said Panda. He pointed to recent instances where North Korea fired missiles in response to military exercises or diplomatic talks by the US and its regional allies, adding: “Anything that the US and South Korea will do, North Korea can proportionately demonstrate that it has capabilities to keep up as well.”
Among the ballistic missiles tested was the Hwasong-12, which traveled more than 4,500 kilometers (about 2,800 miles) in October – flying over Japan, the first time North Korea had done so in five years. Another notable missile was the Hwasong-14, with an estimated range of more than 10,000 kilometers (more than 6,200 miles).
To put those distances in context, the US island territory of Guam is just 3,380 kilometers (2,100 miles) from North Korea.
But one particular weapon has drawn international attention: the Hwasong-17, North Korea’s most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) to date. It could theoretically reach the US mainland – but there are still a lot of unknowns about the missile’s ability to deliver a nuclear payload on target.
North Korea claimed to have successfully launched the Hwasong-17 in March for the first time. However, South Korea and US experts believe the test may have actually been an older and less advanced missile.
The Hwasong-17 was tested again in November, according to North Korean state media, with Kim warning afterward that the country would take “more offensive” action in response to “enemies seeking to destroy peace and stability in the Korean Peninsula and region.”
Since early this year, the US and international observers have been warning that North Korea appears to be preparing for an underground nuclear test – which would be its first since 2017.
Satellite imagery has shown new activity at North Korea’s nuclear test site, where the country has previously conducted six underground nuclear tests. It claimed its most recent test was a hydrogen bomb, the most powerful weapon Pyongyang has ever tested.
That 2017 nuclear test had an estimated yield of 160 kilotons, a measure for how much energy the explosion releases.
For comparison, the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in Japan, yielded just 15 and 21 kilotons respectively. The US and Russia have performed the most explosive tests in history, yielding upwards of 10,000 kilotons.
It’s not clear exactly how many nuclear weapons North Korea possesses. Experts at Federation of American Scientists estimate it may have assembled 20 to 30 nuclear warheads – but its ability to detonate them accurately on the battlefield is unproven.
Though there had once been hopes of a diplomatic breakthrough in 2019 after landmark meetings between Kim and then-US President Donald Trump, those were dashed after both leaders walked away without having struck any formal denuclearization agreements.
US-North Korea relations have nosedived since then, with Kim in 2021 announcing a sweeping five-year plan for modernizing the North’s military, including developing hypersonic weapons and a nuclear-powered submarine.
This year is an extension of that vision, with North Korea working toward developing its own strategic nuclear deterrent as well as nuclear options in any conflict on the Korea Peninsula.
There are a few possible reasons why this year has been so active. Some experts say Kim could have felt empowered to act while the West was preoccupied with the war in Ukraine. Panda, the nuclear expert, added that tensions tend to flare when South Korea has a conservative government – which has been the case since May.
North Korea’s aggressive acceleration in weapons testing has sparked alarm in the region, pushing its exposed neighbors – Japan and South Korea – closer to Western partners.
The US, South Korea and Japan have held a number of joint exercises and fired their own missiles in response to Pyongyang’s tests. The US stepped up its presence in the region, redeploying an aircraft carrier into waters near the peninsula, and sending top-of-the-line stealth fighter aircraft to South Korea for training. Meanwhile, the Quad countries – a grouping of the US, India, Japan and Australia – have deepened military cooperation, with their leaders meeting in May.
Individual governments have also taken dramatic action, with Japan saying it will double its defense spending, the pacifist nation’s biggest military buildup since World War II.
But experts have warned that this rapid militarization could fuel instability across the region. And there’s no clear end in sight; the US and South Korea have more joint exercises planned in the spring, which could propel North Korea to continue firing tests “just to show their displeasure,” said Klingner.
He added that negotiations are unlikely until Kim has further developed his weapons, when “in his mind, he’d be coming back to the table in a position of strength.”
“Each of the lanes of the road, they’ve been improving their capabilities, both nuclear and missile,” he said. “It’s all very, very worrisome.”
Five North Korean drones crossed into South Korean airspace on Monday, prompting the South Korean military to deploy fighter jets and attack helicopters, the country’s defense ministry said.
The ministry said South Korea’s military fired shots at the drones, but added it couldn’t confirm whether any drones were shot down.
Lee Seung-oh, a South Korean defense official, said four of the drones flew around Ganghwa island and one flew over capital Seoul’s northern airspace.
“This is a clear provocation and an invasion of our airspace by North Korea,” Lee said during a briefing. In response to the airspace violation, Lee said, the South Korean military sent its manned and unmanned reconnaissance assets to the inter-Korean border region, with some of them crossing into the North Korean territory.
The assets conducted a reconnaissance mission, including filming North Korea’s military installations, Lee added.
The South Korean military first detected the drones in the skies near the northwestern city of Gimpo at around 10:25 a.m. local time Monday, according to the country’s defense ministry.
The last time a North Korean drone was detected below the inter-Korean border was in 2017, according to the South Korean defense ministry. At the time, South Korea said it had recovered a crashed North Korean drone that was spying on a US-built missile system in the country.
North Korea has aggressively stepped up its missile tests this year, often launching multiple weapons at a time. It’s fired missiles on 36 separate days – the highest annual tally since Kim Jong Un took power in 2012.
Most recently, North Korea launched two short-range ballistic missiles on Friday, according to South Korean officials. The missiles were fired from Pyongyang’s Sunan area into the waters between the Korean Peninsula and Japan.
The secretive country usually test-launches its missiles in this way, firing them at a lofted angle so that they land in the waters between the Korean Peninsula and Japan.
However, in October, it fired an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) at a normal trajectory that went over Japan for the first time in five years.
In November, it claimed to have launched a “new type” of ICBM, Hwasong-17, from Pyongyang International Airfield, a missile that could theoretically reach the mainland United States. And last week, Kim Yo Jong, Kim Jong Un’s sister and a top official in the regime, claimed in state media that North Korea was ready to test-fire an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) at a normal trajectory, a flight pattern that could prove the weapons can threaten the continental United States.
The United States and South Korean experts have warned that Pyongyang could be preparing for a nuclear test, its first in more than five years. North Korea has been developing its nuclear missile forces in violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions, ramping up its activities since the last of three meetings in 2019 between Kim Jong Un and then-US President Donald Trump failed to yield any agreement.
In October, Kim warned his nuclear forces are fully prepared for “actual war.”
“Our nuclear combat forces… proved again their full preparedness for actual war to bring the enemies under their control,” Kim said in comments reported by the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency.
The Biden administration has launched an expansive task force to investigate how US and western components, including American-made microelectronics, are ending up in Iranian-made drones Russia is launching by the hundreds into Ukraine, multiple officials familiar with the effort tell CNN.
The US has imposed tough export control restrictions and sanctions to prevent Iran from obtaining high-end materials, but evidence has emerged that suggests Iran is finding an abundance of commercially-available technology.
Last month, the UK-based investigative organization Conflict Armament Research examined several drones that had been downed in Ukraine and found that 82% of their components were manufactured by companies based in the US.
Among the components found in some of the drones are processors built by the Dallas-based technology company Texas Instruments, according to an investigation by the Ukrainian Armed Forces and a source familiar with the US inquiry, as well as an engine made by an Austrian firm owned by Canada’s Bombardier Recreational Products. Both companies have condemned any use of their technology for illicit purposes.
Their apparently unintentional ensnarement in Iran’s drone manufacturing industry underscores how inexpensive products intended for civilian use can be easily retrofitted for military purposes, and often fall just outside the bounds of sanctions and export control regimes.
Texas Instruments said in a statement to CNN that “TI is not selling any products into Russia, Belarus or Iran. TI complies with applicable laws and regulations in the countries where we operate, and partners with law enforcement organizations as necessary and appropriate. Additionally, we do not support or condone the use of our products in applications they weren’t designed for. ”
Bombardier Recreational Products said in a statement that it was launching an investigation into how the engines ended up in the drones.
The investigation has intensified in recent weeks amid intelligence obtained by the US that the Kremlin is preparing to open its own factory for drone production inside Russia as part of a deal with Iran, the officials said.
Iran has already begun transferring blueprints and components for the drones to Russia to help with production there, CNN has reported, in a dramatic expansion of the countries’ military partnership.
Agencies across Washington are involved in the task force, including the departments of Defense, State, Justice, Commerce and Treasury, with one official describing the inquiry as an “all hands on deck” initiative. The effort is being overseen by the White House National Security Council as part of an even bigger, “holistic approach” to dealing with Iran, a senior administration official said, from its crackdown on protesters and its nuclear program to its deepening role in the war in Ukraine.
But the drone issue is particularly urgent given the sheer volume of US-made components, many of them manufactured in the last couple years, that have been found in the Iranian drones Russia has been deploying across Ukraine against civilians and critical infrastructure.
Conflict Armament Research found that the Iranian drones they examined in Ukraine in November had “higher-end technological capabilities,” including tactical-grade sensors and semiconductors sourced outside of Iran, demonstrating that Tehran “has been able to circumvent current sanction regimes and has added more capabilities and resiliency to its weapons.”
National Security Council official John Kirby told reporters earlier this month that the US would be sanctioning three Russian companies involved in acquiring and using the Iranian drones, and is “assessing further steps we can take in terms of export controls to restrict Iran’s access to sensitive technologies.”
Much of that work has fallen to the task force, officials said, and among its first tasks has been to notify all of the American companies whose components have been found in the drones. Congressional staffers briefed on the effort told CNN that they hope the task force provides lawmakers with a list of US companies whose equipment is being found in the drones in an effort to force greater accountability by urging the companies to monitor their supply chains more closely.
The task force is also having to coordinate with foreign allies, since the components being used in the drones are not limited to those produced by American companies. Conflict Armament Research also found that “more than 70 manufacturers based in 13 different countries and territories” produced the components in the Iranian drones they examined.
In October, CNN obtained access to a drone that was downed in the Black Sea near Odesa and captured by Ukrainian forces. It was found to contain Japanese batteries, an Austrian engine and American processors.
Iran may also be acquiring near-exact replicas of western components from China, according to a study published last month by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. “China plays a larger role than previously assessed in enabling Iran to manufacture and supply drones to Russian forces,” the report found. “It appears that Chinese companies are supplying Iran with copies of Western commodities to produce UAV combat drones.”
The White House believes it is successfully driving home the scale of the issue with allies. The senior administration official told CNN that there was “growing broad and deep international consensus on Iran, from the EU to Canada to Australia and New Zealand, which is being led by US diplomacy.”
There is no evidence that any of the western companies are knowingly exporting their technology to be used in the drones, and that is partly why the task force’s job has been so difficult, officials said.
The task force has its work cut out for it in tracing supply chains for the microelectronics industry, which relies heavily on third party distributors and resellers. The microchips and other small devices ending up in so many of the Iranian and Russian drones are not only inexpensive and widely available, they are also easily hidden.
Iran also uses front companies to buy equipment from the US and EU that may have a dual use, like the Austrian engines, that Tehran can then use to build drones, according to the Treasury Department, which sanctioned several of those companies in September.
That makes supply chain monitoring a challenge, though experts say US and European companies could be doing a lot more to track where their products are going.
“American companies should be doing a lot more to track their supply chains,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, the former chief technology officer at the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
Keeping better track of resellers is a first step, he said, but the task is admittedly difficult because so many of these companies’ products are so commoditized and available off-the-shelf and online for civil purposes. Ultimately, neutering some Iranian front companies with sanctions and cutting off their supply from some western companies will be akin to “a game of whack a mole,” Alperovitch said, noting that they “can easily find another supplier.”
He added that the real “weak underbelly” of US policy when it comes to export controls is enforcement—and prosecuting the specific individuals involved in the illicit transactions.
“We have to beef up the resources for enforcement of our sanctions to achieve the desired effect,” Alperovitch said.
“You can put companies on the [sanctioned] entities list,” he added, “but if you don’t actually go after the people involved, it doesn’t mean a whole lot.”
North Korea fired a pair of ballistic missiles on Sunday toward its eastern waters, its first weapons test in a month and coming two days after it claimed to have performed a key test needed to build a more mobile, powerful intercontinental ballistic missile designed to strike the U.S. mainland.
South Korea’s military detected the launch of two North Korean ballistic missiles from its northwest Tongchangri area. The missiles flew across the country toward its eastern waters, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement.
It said the missiles were fired about 50 minutes apart but gave no further details, like precisely what type of weapons North Korea fired and how far they flew. The Joint Chiefs of Staff said South Korea’s military has bolstered its surveillance posture and maintains a readiness in close coordination with the United States.
Japanese officials also said they spotted the two missile launches from North Korea. Its coast guard said the missiles fired from North Korea fell in the waters between the Korean Peninsula and Japan. Japanese coast guard officials said both missiles landed outside Japan’s exclusive economic zone.
A TV screen shows a North Korea missile launch during a news program at the Yongsan Railway Station in Seoul, South Korea, on Nov. 19, 2022.
KIM Jae-Hwan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
The Tongchangri area is home to North Korea’s Sohae Satellite Launching Ground, where the country in past years launched satellite-carrying long-range rockets in what the U.N. called a disguised test of ICBM technology.
On Thursday, in the Sohae facility, North Korea also performed what it called the test of a “high-thrust solid-fuel motor” for a new strategic weapon, a development that experts say could allow it to possess a more mobile, harder-to-detect arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles that can reach the U.S. mainland.
It wasn’t immediately known if Sunday’s launches occurred from the Sohae facility.
Sunday’s launch is the North’s first public weapons test since the country last month launched its developmental, longest-range liquid-fueled Hwasong-17 ICBM capable of reaching the entire U.S. homeland. In recent months, North Korea has test-launched a barrage of missiles at a record pace, despite pandemic-related economic hardships and U.S.-led pressures to curb its nuclear program.
North Korea has defended its weapons testing as self-defense measures to cope with the expanded U.S.-South Korea military drills that it views as an invasion rehearsal. But some experts say North Korea likely used its rivals’ military training as an excuse to enlarge its weapons arsenal and increase its leverage in future negotiations with the U.S. Last month, President Biden and the leaders of Japan and South Korea vowed a unified, coordinated response to North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs.
The weapon North Korea said it could build with the recently tested motor likely refers to a solid-fueled ICBM, which is among a list of high-tech weapons systems that leader Kim Jong Un vowed to procure during a major ruling Workers’ Party conference early last year. Other weapons systems Kim promised to manufacture include a multi-warhead missile, underwater-launched nuclear missiles and spy satellites.
The fuel in solid-propellant rockets is already loaded inside, which helps to shorten launch preparation times, increase the weapon’s mobility and make it harder for outsiders to detect what’s happening before liftoff. North Korea already has a growing arsenal of short-range, solid-fueled ballistic missiles targeting key locations in South Korea, including U.S. military bases there.
There have also been concerns that North Korea might conduct its first nuclear test in five years. In late October, U.S. and South Korean officials told CBS News that Pyongyang is preparing to test an atomic weapon soon, in what would be its first nuclear test since 2017.
The exact status of North Korea’s nuclear attack capability remains in secrecy, as all its intercontinental ballistic missile tests in recent years have been carried out at a steep angle to avoid neighboring countries.
Some experts speculate North Korea already has functioning nuclear-tipped missiles that can hit the entire U.S., given the number of years it has spent on its nuclear program. But others say country is still years away from acquiring such weapons, saying it has yet to publicly prove it has a technology to protect warheads from the harsh conditions of atmospheric reentry.
North Korea fired a ballistic missile towards the Korean Peninsula’s east coast on Sunday Dec. 18, South Korea’s military said.
Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
North Korea fired two ballistic missiles towards the sea off the Korean Peninsula’s east coast on Sunday, South Korea’s military said.
Japan’s Vice Defence Minister Toshiro Ino said the North Korean-fired ballistic missiles seemed to have landed outside Japan’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ).
The missiles flew to an altitude of 550 kilometers (342 miles) and covered a range of 250 kilometers (53 miles), according to the Japanese Defence Ministry.
Ino said there had been no report of damage from the missiles so far.
The North’s missile launch comes just days after the country tested a high-thrust solid-fuel engine that experts said would allow quicker and more mobile launch of ballistic missiles, as it seeks to develop a new strategic weapon and speed up its nuclear and missile programmes.
The test, overseen by leader Kim Jong Un, was conducted on Thursday at North Korea’s Sohae Satellite Launching Ground which has been used to test missile technologies, including rocket engines and space launch vehicles, the official KCNA news agency reported on Friday.
North Korea has conducted an unprecedented number of missile tests this year, including an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of reaching the U.S. mainland, despite international bans and sanctions.
In November, North Korea test-fired an ICMB that Japanese officials said had sufficient range to reach the mainland of the United States and that landed just 200 kilometers (130 miles) off Japan.
Japan on Friday unveiled its biggest military build-up since World War Two with a $320 billion plan that will buy missiles capable of striking China and ready it for sustained conflict.
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration has reversed a decades-old decision to revoke the security clearance of Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist called the father of the atomic bomb for his leading role in World War II’s Manhattan Project.
U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the 1954 decision by the Atomic Energy Commission was made using a “flawed process” that violated the commission’s own regulations.
“As time has passed, more evidence has come to light of the bias and unfairness of the process that Dr. Oppenheimer was subjected to while the evidence of his loyalty and love of country have only been further affirmed,” Granholm said in a statement on Friday.
Oppenheimer, who died in 1967, led the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. The theoretical physicist was later accused of having communist sympathies and his security clearance was revoked following a four-week, closed-door hearing.
In stripping Oppenheimer of his clearance, the Atomic Energy Commission did not allege that he had revealed or mishandled classified information, nor was his loyalty to the country questioned, according to Granholm’s order. The commission, however, concluded there were “fundamental defects” in his character.
Years later, an Atomic Energy Commission lawyer concluded after an internal review that “the system failed” and a “substantial injustice was done to a loyal American,” according to the secretary’s order.
Granholm said the commission’s decision was driven by a desire among its political leadership to “discredit Oppenheimer in public debates over nuclear weapons policy.”
“Such political motives must have no place in our personnel security process,” she wrote.
U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont applauded the reversal, saying the 1954 decision followed a “manifestly unjust and unethical hearing that would be resoundingly condemned today.”
“This decision reaffirms that government scientists, whether renowned like Oppenheimer or a technician doing his or her daily job — including those willing to raise safety concerns or to express unpopular opinions on matters of national security — can do so freely and that their cases will be fairly reviewed based on facts, not personal animus or politics,” Leahy said in a statement.
The decision comes as the story of Oppenheimer is headed to the big screen. Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” film is expected to be released in theaters in July. It’s based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” and stars Cillian Murphy in the title role.
BEIJING — China strictly adheres to its policy of no first use of nuclear weapons “at any time and under any circumstances,” its Defense Ministry said Tuesday in a scathing response to a U.S. report alleging a major buildup in Beijing’s nuclear capabilities.
The Pentagon last week released an annual China security report that warned Beijing would likely have 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035, and that it has provided no clarity on how it plans to use them.
That report “distorts China’s national defense policy and military strategy, makes groundless speculation about China’s military development and grossly interferes in China’s internal affairs on the issue of Taiwan,” ministry spokesperson Tan Kefei said in a statement.
Tan accused the U.S. of being the “biggest troublemaker and destroyer of world peace and stability,” and repeated that Beijing has never renounced the use of force to conquer self-governing Taiwan, a U.S. ally that China considers part of its territory.
Tan did not directly address the report’s allegations about a Chinese nuclear buildup, but blamed the U.S. for raising nuclear tensions, particularly with its plan to help Australia build a fleet of submarines powered by U.S. nuclear technology, which the French president has described as a “confrontation with China.”
Australia has said it will not seek to arm the submarines with nuclear weapons. Tan also accused the U.S. of having the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, although that title is actually held by Russia, a close Chinese military, economic and diplomatic partner.
As of 2022, Russia possesses a total of 5,977 nuclear warheads compared to 5,428 in the U.S. inventory, according to the Federation of American Scientists. China currently has 350 nuclear warheads, according to the federation.
China has long adhered to what it calls a purely defensive national security strategy, including a claim that it will never be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict. That stance has frequently been challenged at home and abroad, particularly if it comes to a confrontation over Taiwan.
“What needs to be emphasized is that China firmly pursues the nuclear strategy of self-defense and defense, always adheres to the policy of no first use of nuclear weapons at any time and under any circumstances, and maintains its nuclear force at the minimum level required for national security,” Tan said in the statement, which was posted on the ministry’s website.
His remarks came days after U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the U.S. is at a pivotal point with China and will need military strength to ensure that American values, not Beijing’s, set global norms in the 21st century.
Austin’s speech Saturday at the Reagan National Defense Forum capped a week in which the Pentagon was squarely focused on China’s rise and what that might mean for America’s position in the world.
China “is the only country with both the will and, increasingly, the power to reshape its region and the international order to suit its authoritarian preferences,” Austin said. “So let me be clear: We will not let that happen.”
Austin was on hand Friday for a dramatic nighttime rollout of the U.S. military’s newest nuclear stealth bomber, the B-21 Raider, which is being designed to beat the quickly growing cyber, space and nuclear capabilities of Beijing.
The bomber is part of a major China-centric nuclear overhaul underway that the Congressional Budget Office has estimated will cost $1.2 trillion through 2046.
Already-tense relations between Washington and Beijing soured even more in August when U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan. China responded by firing missiles over the island and holding wargames in what was seen as a rehearsal for a possible blockade of the island.
While the U.S. and Taiwan have no formal diplomatic relations in deference to Beijing, the U.S. maintains informal relations and defense ties with Taiwan, along with a policy of “strategic ambiguity” over whether the U.S. would respond militarily if the island were attacked.
Despite some moves to improve relations, China has shown an increasingly hard line on military affairs. Following a rare meeting last month between Austin and his Chinese counterpart, Wei Fenghe, the Chinese side issued a statement saying, “The responsibility for the current situation facing China-U.S. relations is on the U.S. side, not on the Chinese side.”
In his remarks on Taiwan, Tan warned that, “The Chinese military has the confidence and capability to thwart any external interference and separatist plots for ‘Taiwan independence’ and realize the complete reunification of the motherland.”
BERLIN — On a balmy September evening last year, an Azeri man carrying a Russian passport crossed the border from northern Cyprus into southern Cyprus. He traveled light: a pistol, a handful of bullets and a silencer.
It was going to be the perfect hit job.
Then, just as the man was about to step into a rental car and carry out his mission — which prosecutors say was to gun down five Jewish businessmen, including an Israeli billionaire — the police surrounded him.
The failed attack was just one of at least a dozen in Europe in recent years, some successful, others not, that have involved what security officials call “soft” targets, involving murder, abduction, or both. The operations were broadly similar in conception, typically relying on local hired guns. The most significant connection, intelligence officials say, is that the attacks were commissioned by the same contractor: the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In Cyprus, authorities believe Iran, which blames Israel for a series of assassinations of nuclear specialists working on the Iranian nuclear program, was trying to signal that it could strike back where Israel least expects it.
“This is a regime that bases its rule on intimidation and violence and espouses violence as a legitimate measure,” David Barnea, the head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, said in rare public remarks in September, describing what he said was a recent uptick in violent plots. “It is not spontaneous. It is planned, systematic, state terrorism — strategic terrorism.”
He left out one important detail: It’s working.
That success has come in large part because Europe — the staging ground for most Iranian operations in recent years — has been afraid to make Tehran pay. Since 2015, Iran has carried out about a dozen operations in Europe, killing at least three people and abducting several others, security officials say.
“The Europeans have not just been soft on the Islamic Republic, they’ve been cooperating with them, working with them, legitimizing the killers,” Masih Alinejad, the Iranian-American author and women’s rights activist said, highlighting the continuing willingness of European heads of state to meet with Iran’s leaders.
Alinejad, one of the most outspoken critics of the regime, understands better than most just how far Iran’s leadership is willing to go after narrowly escaping both a kidnapping and assassination attempt.
“If the Islamic Republic doesn’t receive any punishment, is there any reason for them to stop taking hostages or kidnapping or killing?” she said, and then answered: “No.”
Method of first resort
Assassination has been the sharpest instrument in the policy toolbox ever since Brutus and his co-conspirators stabbed Julius Caesar repeatedly. Over the millennia, it’s also proved risky, often triggering disastrous unintended consequences (see the Roman Empire after Caesar’s killing or Europe after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo).
And yet, for both rogue states like Iran, Russia and North Korea, and democracies such as the United States and Israel — the attraction of solving a problem by removing it often proves irresistible.
Even so, there’s a fundamental difference between the two spheres: In the West, assassination remains a last resort (think Osama bin Laden); in authoritarian states, it’s the first (who can forget the 2017 assassination by nerve agent of Kim Jong-nam, the playboy half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, upon his arrival in Kuala Lumpur?). For rogue states, even if the murder plots are thwarted, the regimes still win by instilling fear in their enemies’ hearts and minds.
That helps explain the recent frequency. Over the course of a few months last year, Iran undertook a flurry of attacks from Latin America to Africa. In Colombia, police arrested two men in Bogotá on suspicion they were plotting to assassinate a group of Americans and a former Israeli intelligence officer for $100,000; a similar scene played out in Africa, as authorities in Tanzania, Ghana and Senegal arrested five men on suspicion they were planning attacks on Israeli targets, including tourists on safari; in February of this year, Turkish police disrupted an intricate Iranian plot to kill a 75-year-old Turkish-Israeli who owns a local aerospace company; and in November, authorities in Georgia said they foiled a plan hatched by Iran’s Quds Force to murder a 62-year-old Israeli-Georgian businessman in Tbilisi.
Whether such operations succeed or not, the countries behind them can be sure of one thing: They won’t be made to pay for trying. Over the years, the Russian and Iranian regimes have eliminated countless dissidents, traitors and assorted other enemies (real and perceived) on the streets of Paris, Berlin and even Washington, often in broad daylight. Others have been quietly abducted and sent home, where they faced sham trials and were then hanged for treason.
While there’s no shortage of criticism in the West in the wake of these crimes, there are rarely real consequences. That’s especially true in Europe, where leaders have looked the other way in the face of a variety of abuses in the hopes of reviving a deal to rein in Tehran’s nuclear weapons program and renewing business ties.
Unlike the U.S. and Israel, which have taken a hard line on Iran ever since the mullahs came to power in 1979, Europe has been more open to the regime. Many EU officials make no secret of their ennui with America’s hard-line stance vis-à-vis Iran.
“Iran wants to wipe out Israel, nothing new about that,” the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told POLITICO in 2019 when he was still Spanish foreign minister. “You have to live with it.”
History of assassinations
There’s also nothing new about Iran’s love of assassination.
Indeed, many scholars trace the word “assassin” to Hasan-i Sabbah, a 12th-century Persian missionary who founded the “Order of Assassins,” a brutal force known for quietly eliminating adversaries.
Hasan’s spirit lived on in the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the hardline cleric who led Iran’s Islamic revolution and took power in 1979. One of his first victims as supreme leader was Shahriar Shafiq, a former captain in the Iranian navy and the nephew of the country’s exiled shah. He was shot twice in the head in December 1979 by a masked gunman outside his mother’s home on Rue Pergolèse in Paris’ fashionable 16th arrondissement.
In the years that followed, Iranian death squads took out members and supporters of the shah and other opponents across Europe, from France to Sweden, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. In most instances, the culprits were never caught. Not that the authorities really needed to look.
In 1989, for example, Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, a leader of Iran’s Kurdish minority who supported autonomy for his people, was gunned down along with two associates by Iranian assassins in an apartment in Vienna.
The gunmen took refuge in the Iranian embassy. They were allowed to leave Austria after Iran’s ambassador to Vienna hinted to the government that Austrians in his country might be in danger if the killers were arrested. One of the men alleged to have participated in the Vienna operation would later become one of his country’s most prominent figures: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president from 2005 until 2013.
Not even the bad publicity surrounding that case tempered the regime’s killing spree. In the years that followed, the body count only increased. Some of the murders were intentionally gruesome in order to send a clear message.
Fereydoun Farrokhzad, for example, a dissident Iranian popstar who found exile in Germany, was killed in his home in Bonn in 1992. The killers cut off his genitals, his tongue and beheaded him.
His slaying was just one of dozens in what came to be known as Iran’s “chain murders,” a decade-long killing spree in which the government targeted artists and dissidents at home and abroad. Public outcry over the murder of a trio of prominent writers in 1998, including a husband and wife, forced the regime hard-liners behind the killings to retreat. But only for a time.
Illustration by Joan Wong for POLITICO
Then, as now, the dictatorship’s rationale for such killings has been to protect itself.
“The highest priority of the Iranian regime is internal stability,” a Western intelligence source said. “The regime views its opponents inside and outside Iran as a significant threat to this stability.”
Much of that paranoia is rooted in the Islamic Republic’s own history. Before returning to Iran in 1979, Khomeini spent nearly 15 years in exile, including in Paris, an experience that etched the power of exile into the Islamic Republic’s mythology. In other words, if Khomeini managed to lead a revolution from abroad, the regime’s enemies could too.
Bargaining chips
Given Europe’s proximity to Iran, the presence of many Iranian exiles there and the often-magnanimous view of some EU governments toward Tehran, Europe is a natural staging ground for the Islamic Republic’s terror.
The regime’s intelligence service, known as MOIS, has built operational networks across the Continent trained to abduct and murder through a variety of means, Western intelligence officials say.
As anti-regime protests have erupted in Iran with increasing regularity since 2009, the pace of foreign operations aimed at eliminating those the regime accuses of stoking the unrest has increased.
While several of the smaller-scale assassinations — such as the 2015 hit in the Netherlands on Iranian exile Mohammad-Reza Kolahi — have succeeded, Tehran’s more ambitious operations have gone awry.
The most prominent example involved a 2018 plot to blow up the annual Paris meeting of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an alliance of exile groups seeking to oust the regime. Among those attending the gathering, which attracted tens of thousands, was Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and then-U.S. President Donald Trump’s lawyer.
Following a tip from American intelligence, European authorities foiled the plot, arresting six, including a Vienna-based Iranian diplomat who delivered a detonation device and bombmaking equipment to an Iranian couple tasked with carrying out an attack on the rally. Authorities observed the handover at a Pizza Hut in Luxembourg and subsequently arrested the diplomat, Assadollah Assadi, on the German autobahn as he sped back to Vienna, where he enjoyed diplomatic immunity.
Assadi was convicted on terror charges in Belgium last year and sentenced to 20 years is prison. He may not even serve two.
The diplomat’s conviction marked the first time an Iranian operative had been held accountable for his actions by a European court since the Islamic revolution. But Belgium’s courage didn’t last long.
In February, Iran arrested Belgian aid worker Olivier Vandecasteele on trumped-up espionage charges and placed him into solitary confinement at the infamous Evin prison in Tehran. Vandecasteele headed the Iran office of the Norwegian Refugee Council, an aid group.
Following reports that Vandecasteele’s health was deteriorating and tearful public pleas from his family, the Belgian government — ignoring warnings from Washington and other governments that it was inviting further kidnappings — relented and laid the groundwork for an exchange to trade Assadi for Vandecasteele. The swap could happen any day.
“Right now, French, Swedish, German, U.K., U.S., Belgian citizens, all innocents, are in Iranian prisons,” said Alinejad, the Iranian women’s rights campaigner.
“They are being used like bargaining chips,” she said. “It works.”
Amateur hour
Even so, the messiness surrounding the Assadi case might explain why most of Iran’s recent operations have been carried out by small-time criminals who usually have no idea who they’re working for. The crew in last year’s Cyprus attack, for example, included several Pakistani delivery boys. While that gives Iran plausible deniability if the perpetrators get caught, it also increases the likelihood that the operations will fail.
“It’s very amateur, but an amateur can be difficult to trace,” one intelligence official said. “They’re also dispensable. They get caught, no one cares.”
Iranian intelligence has had more success in luring dissidents away from Europe to friendly third countries where they are arrested and then sent back to Iran. That’s what happened to Ruhollah Zam, a journalist critical of the regime who had been living in Paris. The circumstances surrounding his abduction remain murky, but what is known is that someone convinced him to travel to Iraq in 2019, where he was arrested and extradited to Iran. He was convicted for agitating against the regime and hanged in December of 2020.
One could be forgiven for thinking that negotiations between Iran and world powers over renewing its dormant nuclear accord (which offered Tehran sanctions relief in return for supervision of its nuclear program) would have tamed its covert killing program. In fact, the opposite occurred.
In July of 2021, U.S. authorities exposed a plot by Iranian operatives to kidnap Alinejad from her home in Brooklyn as part of an elaborate plan that involved taking her by speedboat to a tanker in New York Harbor before spiriting her off to Venezuela, an Iranian ally, and then on to the Islamic Republic.
A year later, police disrupted what the FBI believed was an attempt to assassinate Alinejad, arresting a man with an assault rifle and more than 60 rounds of ammunition who had knocked on her door.
American authorities also say Tehran planned to avenge the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani, the head of its feared paramilitary Quds Force who was the target of a U.S. drone strike in 2020, by seeking to kill former National Security Adviser John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State, among other officials.
Through it all, neither the U.S. nor Europe gave up hope for a nuclear deal.
“From the point of view of the Iranians, this is proof that it is possible to separate and maintain a civilized discourse on the nuclear agreement with a deceptive Western appearance, on the one hand, and on the other hand, to plan terrorist acts against senior American officials and citizens,” Barnea, the Mossad chief said. “This artificial separation will continue for as long as the world allows it to.”
Kremlin’s killings
Some hope the growing outrage in Western societies over Iran’s crackdown on peaceful protestors could be the spark that convinces Europe to get tough on Iran. But Europe’s handling of its other favorite rogue actor — Russia — suggests otherwise.
Long before Russia’s annexation of Crimea, much less its all-out war against Ukraine, Moscow, similar to Iran, undertook an aggressive campaign against its enemies abroad and made little effort to hide it.
Russian police investigators stand near the body of killed Russian opposition leader and former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov | Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images
The most prominent victim was Alexander Litvinenko. A former KGB officer like Vladimir Putin, Litvinenko had defected to the U.K., where he joined other exiles opposed to Putin. In 2006, he was poisoned in London by Russian intelligence with polonium-210, a radioactive isotope that investigators concluded was mixed into his tea. The daring operation signaled Moscow’s return to the Soviet-era practice of artful assassination.
Litvinenko died a painful death within weeks, but not before he blamed Putin for killing him, calling the Russian president “barbaric.”
“You may succeed in silencing me, but that silence comes at a price,” Litvinenko said from his deathbed.
In the end, however, the only one who really paid a price was Litvinenko. Putin continued as before and despite deep tensions in the U.K.’s relationship with Russia over the assassination, it did nothing to halt the transformation of the British capital into what has come to be known as “Londongrad,” a playground and second home for Russia’s Kremlin-backed oligarchs, who critics say use the British financial and legal systems to hide and launder their money.
Litvinenko’s killing was remarkable both for its brutality and audacity. If Putin was willing to take out an enemy on British soil with a radioactive element, what else was he capable of?
It didn’t take long to find out. In the months and years that followed, the bodies started to pile up. Critical journalists, political opponents and irksome oligarchs in the prime of life began dropping like flies.
Europe didn’t blink.
Angela Merkel, then German chancellor, visited Putin in his vacation residence in Sochi just weeks after the murders of Litvinenko and investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya and said … nothing.
Even after there was no denying Putin’s campaign to eradicate anyone who challenged him, European leaders kept coming in the hope of deepening economic ties.
Neither the assassination of prominent Putin critic Boris Nemtsov just steps away from the Kremlin in 2015, nor the poisoning of a KGB defector and his daughter in the U.K. in 2018 and of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2020 with nerve agents disabused European leaders of the notion that Putin was someone they could do business with and, more importantly, control.
‘Anything can happen’
Just how comfortable Russia felt about using Europe as a killing field became clear in the summer of 2019. Around noon on a sunny August day, a Russian assassin approached Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Chechen with Georgian nationality, and shot him twice in the head with a 9mm pistol. The murder took place in a park located just a few hundred meters from Germany’s interior ministry and several witnesses saw the killer flee. He was nabbed within minutes as he was changing his clothes and trying to dispose of his weapon and bike in a nearby canal.
It later emerged that Khangoshvili, a Chechen fighter who had sought asylum in Germany, was on a Russian kill list. Russian authorities considered him a terrorist and accused him of participating in a 2010 attack on the Moscow subway that killed nearly 40 people.
In December of 2019, Putin denied involvement in Khangoshvili’s killing. Sort of. Sitting next to French President Emmanuel Macron, Merkel and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy following a round of talks aimed at resolving the conflict in Ukraine, the Russian referred to him as a “very barbaric man with blood on his hands.”
“I don’t know what happened to him,” Putin said. “Those are opaque criminal structures where anything can happen.”
Early on October 19 of last year, Berlin police discovered a dead man on the sidewalk outside the Russian embassy. He was identified as Kirill Zhalo, a junior diplomat at the embassy. He was also the son of General Major Alexey Zhalo, the deputy head of a covert division in Russia’s FSB security service in Moscow that ordered Khangoshvili’s killing. Western intelligence officials believe that Kirill Zhalo, who arrived in Berlin just weeks before the hit on the Chechen, was involved in the operation and was held responsible for its exposure.
The Russian embassy called his death “a tragic accident,” suggesting he had committed suicide by jumping out of a window. Russia refused to allow German authorities to perform an autopsy (such permission is required under diplomatic protocols) and sent his body back to Moscow.
Less than two months later, the Russian hitman who killed Khangoshvili, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Russia recently tried to negotiate his release, floating the possibility of exchanging American basketball player Brittney Griner and another U.S. citizen they have in custody. Washington rejected the idea.
The war in Ukraine offers profound lessons about the inherent risks of coddling dictators.
Though Germany, with its thirst for Russian gas, is often criticized in that regard, it was far from alone in Europe. Europe’s insistence on giving Putin the benefit of the doubt over the years in the face of his crimes convinced him that he would face few consequences in the West for his invasion of Ukraine. That’s turned out to be wrong; but who could blame the Russian leader for thinking it?
Iran presents Europe with an opportunity to learn from that history and confront Tehran before it’s too late. But there are few signs it’s prepared to really get tough. EU officials say they are “considering” following Washington’s lead and designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a vast military organization that also controls much of the Iran’s economy, as a terror organization. Last week, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock spearheaded an effort at the United Nations to launch a formal investigation into Iran’s brutal crackdown against the ongoing protests in the country.
Yet even as the regime in Tehran snuffs out enemies and races to fulfil its goal of building both nuclear weapons and missiles that can reach any point on the Continent, some EU leaders appear blind to the wider context as they pursue the elusive renewal of the nuclear accord.
“It is still there,” Borrell said recently of the deal he has taken a leading role in trying to resurrect. “It has nothing to do with other issues, which certainly concern us.”
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is planning to build “the world’s most powerful” nuclear force, state news agency KCNA reported on Sunday.
The “ultimate goal” behind North Korea’s nuclear program was to possess an “absolute force, unprecedented in the century,” Kim said Saturday as part of an order promoting dozens of military officials, the agency reported.
The order comes after what North Korea said was a “test firing of a new kind” of intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) on November 18.
The missile was a Hwaseong-17, according to KCNA, a huge rocket that is theoretically capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to the United States mainland.
Kim commended the officials who developed the new missile in his comments.
He called the missile “the world’s strongest strategic weapon” and said it represented “a wonderful leap forward in the development of the technology of mounting nuclear warheads on ballistic missiles.”
With the development of the new ICBM, Kim said North Korea had demonstrated to the world “the confident, ever-victorious future of our state advancing toward the goal of building the world’s strongest army.”
In a letter sent to Kim recently, scientists from North Korea’s Academy of Defense Science said the test firing marked a “great historic victory” for the country and demonstrated North Korea’s sovereignty.
Kim himself attended the launch with a child believed to be his daughter, Ju Ae.
Pyongyang also released a video of the missile launch, only the third time it has done so since 2017, according to Ankit Panda, senior fellow in the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
While the test did show Pyongyang can launch a large ICBM and keep it aloft for more than an hour, North Korea still hasn’t demonstrated the ability to place a warhead atop a long-range ballistic missile – projectiles that are fired into space – that is able to survive the fiery reentry into Earth’s atmosphere.
But analysts say that with repeated tests, the North Koreans are refining their capabilities.
In his order, Kim said that North Korea was building a nuclear force to protect the dignity and sovereignty of the state and its people and said that his country’s “ultimate goal is to possess the world’s most powerful strategic force, the absolute force unprecedented in the century”.
He said the Hwasong-17 — an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of reaching the United States — was the “world’s strongest strategic weapon” and that it demonstrated North Korea’s resolve and ability to eventually build the world’s strongest army.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and his daughter attend a photo session with the scientists, engineers, military officials and others involved in the test-firing of the country’s new Hwasong-17 missile [KCNA via Reuters]
The ICBM launch on November 18 has been condemned by members of the United Nations Security Council, who called it “a serious escalation” and an “unequivocal threat to international peace and security”. The launch is part of an ongoing blitz of North Korean tests this year that have included the firing of cruise missiles as well as dozens of short- and medium-range ballistic missiles.
Kim said on Saturday that North Korean scientists have also made a “wonderful leap forward in the development of the technology of mounting nuclear warheads on ballistic missiles”.
He did not elaborate further.
That ability is critical if North Korea wants to achieve its goal of possessing a nuclear weapon that can strike its main foe, the US.
Outside observers say that while North Korea has nuclear bombs and missiles that can fly as far as the US, it is not clear if Pyongyang’s scientists can miniaturise the atomic weapons to fit inside the cramped space in the nose of the missiles.
Kim told the scientists, engineers, military officials and others involved in the Hwasong-17 test on Saturday that he expects them to continue to expand and strengthen the country’s nuclear deterrent at an extraordinarily rapid pace.
The North Korean leader and his daughter went on to pose for a series of pictures with those workers as well as the Hwasong-17.
In a separate report, KCNA also said North Korea’s powerful Standing Committee of the Supreme People’s Assembly had awarded the Hwasong-17 missile the title of “DPRK Hero and Gold Star Medal and Order of National Flag 1st Class”. DPRK refers to North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
KCNA said the missile “clearly proved before the world that the DPRK is a full-fledged nuclear power capable of standing against the nuclear supremacy of the US imperialists and fully demonstrated its might as the most powerful ICBM state”.
The test fire also demonstrated that North Korea will react in kind to “the enemy’s nuke and full-frontal confrontation,” it added.
Vice President Kamala Harris is sticking close to her script when responding to what Democrats hope will once again be their greatest electoral mobilizer: Donald Trump and his third White House bid.
“The president said he intends to run and if he does, I will be running with him,” she told CNN on Tuesday – the first time she’d been asked about Trump’s 2024 candidacy, which he announced last week. She was addressing a gaggle of reporters aboard the Teresa Magbanua, a Philippine Coast Guard vessel stationed at the edge of the South China Sea.
Her cautious response at the end of a weeklong gaffe-free trip to Thailand and the Philippines could serve as a reflection of Harris’ vice presidency in its second year: toe the line but don’t make waves.
As she returns from Asia, she’s stuck in a swirl of uncertainty about her place in the party if the now 80-year-old President Joe Biden does not seek a second term. The President is expected to consider the decision over Thanksgiving and upcoming holidays with family, whose advice he’ll seek about running for reelection.
Harris’ trip to Asia – her third to the region since taking office – was another chance for America’s first South Asian vice president to showcase her ability to lead in the traditional ways of the vice presidency without overstepping her role as No. 2.
She attended a series of bilateral meetings and greetings with Asian prime ministers and presidents alike, including China’s President Xi Jinping, called a last-minute high-profile meeting with Indo-Pacific countries after North Korea launched a long-range ballistic missile hours before the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Leaders’ summit began and went on a symbolic visit to the Philippines’ archipelago island of Palawan, which could potentially heighten tensions with China.
With Biden in Washington, DC, for his granddaughter’s wedding, Harris continued her role as his top-ranking envoy in a trip meant to deepen ties to mostly friendly Asian nations and cast the US as the region’s best option for economic stability –part of an ongoing effort to counter China’s growing influence.
The vice president called the trip a success, as she brandished her policy chops in the region, attempting to fashion herself as a deft leader who speaks for Biden in his absence.
“It is very important that we were here today to restate the United States commitment to international rules and norms. This trip and this visit in particular has also been about demonstrating the strength and importance of our relationship with the Philippines both as it relates to economic issues and also security issues,” Harris said in Palawan, in a speech where she rejected China’s aggression in the South China Sea and announced funding initiatives ameant to beef up the country’s systems and deepen security ties.
Still, Harris’ events were tightly scripted and the trip itself, highly choreographed.
Harris’ “brief greeting” with Xi, as her office described it, was her first face-to-face meeting with the world leader, happening on the margins of APEC. It was likely Harris’ most high-profile moment of the trip, despite the lack of US press in the room to witness it. The vice president met with him just a week after Biden’s first in-person bilateral with Xi, which lasted three hours.
But unlike the president, who can share as much of a conversation as he pleases, there was an obvious limit to how much Harris felt comfortable sharing. She repeatedly declined to go far beyond what was written in a carefully calculated statement on her meeting with Xi.
“We discussed that we are keeping open lines of communication, that we do not seek conflict or confrontation, but we welcome competition,” Harris told reporters in a press conference wrapping up her trip to Thailand, dodging twice whether that conversation touched on North Korea or Taiwan.
If the goal was to remain gaffe free, the planning seems to have paid off. The Republican National Committee only clipped on Twitter moments thatmay have been awkward but didn’t lend themselves to real criticism –unusual treatment for one of their most attacked Democrats.
On the first day of APEC, a “deeply concerned” Harris rushed aides to convene a last-minute unannounced multi-lateral emergency meeting with Indo-Pacific region allies, according to a senior administration official, after North Korea launched a long-range ballistic missile Friday morning– her second most high-profile moment of the trip.
Harris directed her team once she was briefed on the latest launch, a White House official said utilizing the Indo-Pacific nation’s presence at the APEC Leaders Summit to do so. At the head of a u-shaped table inside a small room in the Queen Sirikit National Convention Center, the vice president accused North Korea of “brazen violation of multiple UN security resolutions.”
“This conduct by North Korea most recently is a brazen violation of multiple UN Security resolutions. It destabilizes security in the region, and unnecessarily raises tensions. We strongly condemn these actions, and we again call North Korea to stop further unlawful destabilizing,” Harris said. “On behalf of the United States, I reaffirmed our ironclad commitment to our Indo Pacific Alliance.”
Her statement closely tracked one the National Security Council issued hours earlier on Biden’s behalf, almost to a tee.
The last-minute nature of the meeting caused aides to move quickly to corral the US press, but without time to pre-set cameras, press from the US, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Korea were fighting for an angle – causing the photo-op visuals to be at times shaky and askew.
Still, it was a moment that looked almost presidential for Harris as it was reminiscent of the emergency in-person meeting Biden convened with top allies during his final day at the G20 in Indonesia, when a Russian-made missile fell inside the borders of a NATO ally.
But the presidential posturing had limits. During the weeklong trip, the vice president only answered political and policy questions on two separate occasions from the group of all women reporters traveling with her from Washington – taking two or three questions each time.
Harris didn’t stray from talking points in her answers, careful not to move beyond Biden’s position on a multitude of issues.
Harris has long sought opportunities to showcase her own interests and craft her own lane as a younger vice president with potential presidential ambitions.
Domestically, she has taken the lead for the administration on abortion rights. And on foreign trips, Harris has told aides she wants to go outside of the box when it comes to the schedule. A major part of that has been to meet with women and families in different countries.
That directive was evident in Manila, when she participated in a moderated conversation about women’s empowerment and entrepreneurship inside a ballroom in the Sofitel.
“On the issue of the economic wellbeing of women, I think we all know, and I feel very strongly, you lift up the economic status of a woman, her family will be lifted. Her community will be lifted,” Harris said as the Filipino women nodded in agreement. “All of society will benefit. Lift up the economic status of women, and all of society benefits.”
In the Palawan fishing village of Tagburos, Harris watched women clean fish in front of a picturesque backdrop to talk about the devastation climate change and illegal fishing has had on the village.
“Hi ma’am,” they yelled as she approached. Harris’ translator introduced the women as her best friends.
“Best friends,” Harris said, with a laugh and a wave.
