Kim Jong Un Eyes More Nuclear Warheads as U.S. Leads Allied War Games

Kim Jung Un this week encouraged an exponential increase in North Korea's nuclear arsenal, state media said Tuesday, as the United States continued a month of intense war games with Pyongyang's neighbors.

Kim and other Workers' Party officials inspected a new set of nuclear warheads for short-range missiles on Monday during a visit to the country's Nuclear Weapons Institute, according to images published by KCNA, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's official news agency.

U.S. and South Korean officials said last year that activity had resumed at the North's Punggye-ri underground nuclear test site, and that the regime's first test since 2017 could be coming. But under the current climate, a seventh nuclear test is far from a certainty, observers said.

The technical specifications of the red and green warheads remained unclear and their capabilities untested, the Republic of Korea's joint chiefs of staff said in remarks to the press on Tuesday.

The institute visited by Kim was seeing through work to bolster the North's nuclear force "both in quality and quantity," according to KCNA, which said the supreme leader personally oversaw the fitting of warheads onto missiles.

Kim called for the expanded "production of weapon-grade nuclear materials" to implement Pyongyang's plan of "increasing nuclear arsenals exponentially," the state-owned agency reported.

Separately, the North publicized images of what it said was a test of a pair of "ground-to-ground tactical ballistic missiles" in a nuclear airburst demonstration with dummy warheads, 1,600 feet above an island target range. Seoul and Tokyo had both tracked Pyongyang's 10th launch event of the year—its 20th and 21st missiles in 2023—the previous morning.

Northern radio service Voice of Korea on Tuesday called the event a "simulated nuclear attack" in a series of reports that took aim at U.S.-led military drills with the South in March, including the largest U.S.-ROK springtime war games—computer simulations and field exercises—in five years, aimed at deterring Kim's more than 70 missile tests last year, a single-year record.

America was preparing to invade the North with its "war frenzy," state newspaper Rodong Sinmum said in an editorial on March 28: "The reckless military provocations and war exercises of the United States would bring the situation of the Korean Peninsula to the critical point of dangerous nuclear war on the eve of explosion."

The U.S. says the military drills with its Asian allies are defensive in nature.

"I'm not threatened or worried about North Korea," Rear Adm. Christopher Sweeney, who commands the carrier strike group led by USS Nimitz, told reporters on Monday as the U.S. Navy wrapped up back-to-back maritime drills with the Japanese and then the South Korean navies.

The Nimitz and her escorts made a port call on Tuesday in the South Korean city of Busan ahead of trilateral naval drills with Japan and South Korea next week.

Pyongyang has military and political reasons for continuing its unprecedented missile tests, said Lin Chih Hao, an assistant research fellow and inter-Korean expert at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taipei. They include a desire to develop and verify new launch capabilities in order to reduce the risk of failure and prevent an effective allied counterstrike, he told Newsweek.

Politically, Kim wants to "express strong dissatisfaction at the U.S.-ROK military exercises and raise a domestic sense of political crisis to divert public discontent away from the food shortage," said Lin. "North Korea has a very serious food crisis at the moment. Even if it increases its food production, it cannot completely solve the problems of insufficient supply and rural economic imbalance."

Given the North's successful nuclear tests in the past, a seventh round would achieve more political rather than military gains, Lin argued.

Diverging U.S. and Sino-Russian policies toward the peninsula mean another nuclear test could spark a larger military crisis that would anger Beijing and Moscow, on whom Pyongyang relies, he said. It could also boost support for South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, whose government is already pursuing a bold rapprochement with Japan over long-standing wartime disputes at the risk of upsetting public opinion in the South.

"We shouldn't formally accept North Korea as a nuclear power, as that may only encourage South Korea and/or Japan to themselves go nuclear," Sean King, an Asia scholar who is the senior vice president at New York-based consultancy Park Strategies, told Newsweek.

"We should continue to stand strong and demonstrate resolve with our allies, through exercises and otherwise, which is now only made easier by the current warming in Seoul-Tokyo relations," he said. "We should also, wherever possible, deprive the heinous Kim regime of the cash it needs to operate. Specifically, this means denying U.S. correspondent bank account access to any mainland Chinese and/or other overseas entities handling said payments."

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Update 28/3/23, 12:45 p.m.: This article was updated with further context.