North Korea threatens to resume nuclear weapons tests, citing US 'military threats'
North Korea on Thursday threatened to scrap its self-imposed moratorium on testing nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, lashing out at American "military threats" that it said had reached a "danger line".
Leader Kim Jong-un convened a meeting of the powerful politburo of the ruling Workers' Party to discuss countermeasures to American hostility, North Korean state media reported.
"The hostile policy and military threats of the United States have reached a danger line that cannot be overlooked any more despite our sincere efforts for maintaining the general tide for the relaxation of tensions," the KCNA news agency said.
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The politburo had ordered a rethink of "trust-building measures that we took on our own initiative" and a re-examination of whether to restart "all temporally-suspended activities", it said.
The order came after the Joe Biden administration last week announced fresh sanctions on six North Koreans involved in the regime's weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programmes.
It also followed a series of missile tests by North Korea, including two tests of what Pyongyang claimed to be a hypersonic missile.
North Korea has not tested its long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) or nuclear weapons since 2017; a move that led to a flurry of diplomacy with Washington the following year.
But it began testing a range of new short-range ballistic missiles SRBM designs after denuclearisation talks stalled and slipped back into a stand-off with the US following a failed summit in 2019.
Professor Yang Moo-jin of the University of North Korean Studies said the KCNA report was "quite disturbing" as the North appeared to be preparing to "cross the red line" and move towards the resumption of the ICBM tests.
"The North is declaring a tit-for-tat policy ahead of the United Nations Security Council meeting" this week as the United States is pushing the UNSC to impose more sanctions on North Korea following the recent series of North Korean missile launches, he said.
Following short-range missile tests, Pyongyang was likely to test middle-range missiles and then move on to ICBMs unless the US showed signs of easing sanctions, he said.
With the 80th anniversary of the birthday of Kim Jong-un's father Kim Jong-il looming on February 16 and the 110th anniversary of the birthday of his grandfather Kim il-sung on April 15 this year, Pyongyang will be looking for ways to create a festive mood amid its dire economic difficulties.
"And ICBMs could serve as a huge celebratory firecracker," Yang said.
The 8th Party Congress military modernisation agenda laid out in January 2021 includes solid-fuel and multiple-warhead ICBMs.
"The notion then of reconsidering 'trust-building' points toward the realisation of the next steps in the 8th Party Congress agenda. This isn't too surprising given what we've known since last January, and really since late-2019," tweeted Ankit Panda, a senior fellow at the US-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
In early 2019, Kim had reiterated his commitment to "neither make and test nuclear weapons any longer nor to use and proliferate them" and to "advance towards complete denuclearisation."
But he began to signal Pyongyang's diminished confidence in continued diplomacy with Washington after the 2019 no-deal summit in Hanoi with US President Donald Trump.
He ended 2019 with a warning that North Korea would "steadily develop indispensable and prerequisite strategic weapons for national security" in 2020.
He also said that North Korea's steps to bolster the country's nuclear deterrent would "be properly coordinated depending on the US future attitude" toward Pyongyang.
In December 2019, at the Fifth Plenum of the 7th Central Committee of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea, Kim Jong-un suggested he felt there was no longer any reason to be bound by his April 2018 moratorium on long-range missile and nuclear tests.
North Korea had framed that moratorium as one of the unilateral measures it offered to build trust with the US.
South Korea's defence ministry said the North's most recent missile tests were "serious threats".
The Unification Ministry handling inter-Korean ties warned against further escalation, saying the peninsula should not go back to the confrontational past, and dialogue and diplomacy were the only way forward.
Additional reporting by Reuters
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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