Yonhap:

The United States and South Korea should brace themselves for a series of nuclear and ballistic missile tests by North Korea this year, an American security expert said Monday, calling for the allies to further bolster joint capabilities to cope with North Korean threats.

Victor Cha, chief Korea analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, made the remark in a policy suggestion report for the new year, cautioning against reading North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s New Year’s address positively.

“The United States is likely to see the next series of North Korean nuclear and ballistic missile tests. These may demonstrate Pyongyang’s crossing of a new technology threshold, such as warhead miniaturization, a uranium-based test, more accurate ballistic missile or nuclear fusion capabilities,” he said.

North Korea could use various pretexts for provocations, such as annual joint military exercises between South Korea and the U.S., U.N. actions on its human rights abuses or U.S. sanctions and other measures aimed at punishing Pyongyang for the cyber-attack on Sony Pictures, Cha said.
“In any event, the administration must be prepared to meet these provocations with concrete measures that acknowledge the necessity of deterring a nuclear North Korea,” the expert said, suggesting deploying more advanced missile defense systems on the Korean Peninsula could be one way to strengthen deterrence capabilities.

Cha also warned against interpreting the New Year’s address by the North’s leader as positive, playing down Kim’s calls for improvement in inter-Korean relations and his willingness for an inter-Korean summit as nothing but a usual element that must go into such a speech.

“I didn’t read anything special in the North Korean New Year’s speech … If you’re the speechwriter for the North Korea New Year’s speech, you’ve got to sort of check that box, right? You have to say, oh yeah, I have to say something about inter-Korean relations,” he said.

“That to me is not surprising at all. I don’t think there is anything outside of that that is unusually positive in terms of a New Year’s speech. In fact, if you read the rest of the New Year’s speech, it’s quite concerning because it talks about inflexibility on ‘Byeongjin’ and just continuing with the same line. It’s not positive at all,” he said.

Byeongjin refers to the North’s policy of seeking nuclear and economic development at the same time.

Cha also called on the U.S. to work harder to help mend long-strained bilateral relations between South Korea and Japan, saying three-way cooperation between Washington, Seoul and Tokyo should be seen as the most reliable source of stability in Asia.

The expert said that the White House should seek defense agreements with the two allies, such as a military parts servicing agreement and a collective defense statement, just as the three nations concluded an intelligence sharing memorandum of understanding last month, though the MOU was limited to information on North Korea.

Cha said that the U.S. should also be prepared to cope with growing cyber-attacks from the North and try to use the issue of human rights to supplement traditional defense, deterrence and denuclearization policies toward the North.