Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Why does North Korea want to launch a military satellite? What is the significance of the failure of a military satellite launch in relation to the development of weapons? When will the 7th nuclear test take place?
To start off the new year, Tom Collina sits down with Ankit Panda, Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Kim Jong-un's foot is fully on the accelerator. If his father's policy was military first, then for Kim at this point, it seems to be nuclear weapons first. He is all in on nuclear development.
2022 has been unprecedented just in the intensity of North Korea's launch activity. After this month on November 2022, it just has become completely impossible to keep track of the precise number of missiles that North Korea has been launching.
Quantitatively, the North Korean arsenal of deployed nuclear delivery systems and warheads remains smaller than that of any other nuclear state. Qualitatively, matters are a bit more nuanced.
There's also a simple geographic reality that given North Korea's geographic position on the globe and their ambitions to develop long-range missiles, at some point they have to fly over another country's territory.
North Korea test-fired a ballistic missile over Japan, believed to be the farthest its ever launched one before. It prompted people to take shelter, and heightened concerns over escalating aggression in the region.
Denuclearization is now in the dustbin of history as a failed policy. There is simply no practical plan at this point, especially in the short term, to bring North Korea to the negotiating table.
The North Koreans have persistently rejected the idea of any form of international order really having an effect of how states relate to each other.
There is a continuity with the way that North Korean leaders have been talking about nuclear weapons for sometime