TOKYO ( President Joe Biden will travel to Asia on Thursday to meet with close allies in South Korea and Japan. It will come amid a growing risk that North Korea will return to nuclear weapons tests it abandoned 3 years ago.
As Elizabeth Palmer, CBS News’ senior correspondent, reports, the remote “Hermit Kingdom” is raising the stakes on its nuclear strategy even as the country faces a primary outbreak of COVID-19.
Almost exactly 4 years ago, North Korea made a big splash by blowing up the tunnels at its Punggye-ri nuclear control facility. It was intended to be a step forward in a long negotiation process towards the denuclearization of the country of dictator Kim Jong Un.
But as Palmer reports, North Korea is now taking a step back.
“They sought to demonstrate, in a notoriously mistaken way, that they were committed to denuclearization,” Joe Bermudez, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told CBS News. “The truth is that they didn’t destroy the tunnel. They just destroyed the portal. The door is the opening component of it. “
Now, Bermudez says new satellite images show north Korea has excavated a new logo on the front of a tunnel that is still intact at the site.
“It’s going pretty far, and they may have a device in position by the end of the month,” he predicted.
A “device” that is a nuclear bomb that, unlike the explosions of 2018 highlighted for the whole world to see, would explode deep underground. According to analysts, the purpose of further nuclear testing is to refine and miniaturize nuclear warheads for North Korea’s missile arsenal.
Under Kim’s orders, North Korea has been testing missile after missile this year. They are designed to bring in nuclear warheads, and some are tough enough to succeed in the Americas.
Bermudez says that for Pyongyang, the end of the test escalation and the imminent risk of returning to nuclear testing is simple: “The survival of the Kim regime and the survival of North Korea, and in that order. “
He said North Korea had calculated that a demonstrated nuclear weapons strike capability would prevent any other country from attacking, he added, and especially the United States.
North Korea’s relationship with the rest of the world has deteriorated especially over the past two decades. As recently as 2008, the New York Philharmonic held a historic concert in Pyongyang.
But that’s at a time when the dictator of the ruling Kim dynasty, Kim Jong-il, appeared to be in a position to curtail his country’s nuclear program.
There was another burst of optimism in 2018, when President Donald Trump met with the son of Kim, North Korea’s current omnipotent leader, for face-to-face talks. But those talks collapsed, leaving a damaging stalemate in their wake.
In April, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said that “instead of showing a willingness to intelligent religion and negotiating, communicating and using diplomacy, the North continues to conduct tests. “
Asked what helps him stay up at night as a longtime observer of nuclear stagnation, Bermudez told CBS News it was the threat of a “miscalculation. “
“This is my biggest concern,” he said: that anything that starts “as a minor incident could temporarily escalate by a miscalculation. “This threat is compounded, according to Bermudez, through Pyongyang’s simplistic strategic thinking.
“When we look, you know, how the dynamics of foreign policy, nuclear policy has evolved over the years, we have a tendency to be very conservative and very reluctant to use nuclear weapons,” he said. “While North Korea has a very, as far as we can tell, an unsophisticated strategy for nuclear weapons. “
Palmer says the background music emanating from Pyongyang is now loud, transparent and, the Philharmonic Orchestra, blatantly bellicose.
The country’s burgeoning coronavirus outbreak may distract leaders, but Kim’s nuclear ambitions are disappearing and analysts warn that the threat of a fatal miscalculation is growing.
This is all President Biden will have to consider on his layover on the Korean peninsula later this week.