Atlantic Council:

On January 1, North Korea’s ruling-party newspaper published the results of a meeting with ominous implications. Chairman Kim Jong Un had declared that the world would soon witness a new strategic weapon from North Korea, and added that he no longer “felt bound” by his pledge to halt inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM) launches and nuclear testing. Eight months have passed since this promise, but that does not mean a new strategic weapon is not coming—or that we should take his warnings lightly. And speculation that the “new strategic weapon” is a ballistic-missile submarine or submarine-launched ballistic missile itself distracts from the need to focus on a far-more credible and urgent threat: North Korea’s rollout and test launches of more advanced road-mobile ballistic missiles.

In his 2017 New Year’s address, Kim asserted that North Korea was in the final stages of preparations for ICBM test launching, but it took until the July 4 holiday that year for North Korea to follow through and conduct its first Hwasong-14 ICBM launch. It was not until late November that North Korea launched an even larger ICBM, the Hwasong-15, with the accompanying claim that ICBM testing had been completed successfully. There are many potential reasons for the long period between North Korea’s announcement and launches in 2017, including its need to first complete preliminary test launches of the Hwasong-12, an intermediate-range missile that the Nuclear Threat Initiative assessed to be a “stepping stone” to an ICBM.

This year, by comparison, there are a myriad of potential reasons for the delay in carrying out Kim’s announcement, besides just technical ones, including disruptions caused by COVID-19, summer typhoons, and political considerations: the upcoming U.S. presidential election, a series of meetings of North Korea’s ruling Korean Workers’ Party, and the Party anniversary in October. Even if he is confident that his “new strategic weapon” will work, Kim may be waiting for just the right political moment to display it and then to launch it. If he offers up an “October surprise” this year, it probably won’t be the North Korean version of the fictional Soviet ballistic-missile submarine “Red October.” Instead, it may well come in the form of new missiles displayed on the streets of Pyongyang during the Party’s 75th anniversary parade…

Click here to read the full article.