Why is North Korea test-launching missiles again? Michael Breen on possible signs of change in the time of Kim Jong-un—and the challenge of seeing them clearly at all.
On April 22, Pyongyang fired a barrage of rockets into the East Sea, in what it said was the first test of a new command-and-control system for launching nuclear counterattacks. The test was just the latest in a series over the past few months: In March, North Korea tested long-range artillery; back in January, a hypersonic missile that could evade defense systems in South Korea and the U.S.; before that, in December, a non-nuclear ballistic missile that could reach the U.S. mainland.
Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un declared that the tests in March and April were responses to joint South Korean-U.S. military exercises underway at the time. But a number of analysts have seen the episodes as signs of something else: that Pyongyang is preparing a military attack. Late last year, it announced it henceforth considers South Korea a hostile country and no longer seeks reunification with it. Then, in January, Robert Carlin and Siegfried Hecker, two U.S. officials who’ve worked on North Korea for decades—Carlin with the State Department and CIA, Hecker as the former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, the U.S. center for nuclear-weapons research—released an influential report detailing why they think Kim has made the decision to go to war.
What’s going on in Pyongyang?
Michael Breen has lived in South Korea for more than 40 years and is the author of three books on the two Koreas, including a biography of Kim’s father, Kim Jong-il. According to Breen, outside observers always have to interpret North Korean weapons tests through layers of possible meaning, often difficult to parse. Still, in the moment, he sees evidence that the tests potentially belong to the start of a transformative change—in a country long known for almost no change. After decades of privileging the military above all other institutions in North Korea, the government in Pyongyang is now instead showing signs of focus on broad economic development. But if he’s right, Breen says, it means Kim is trying to alter his country’s economy without altering its totalitarian politics—raising an enormous question about where and how far this change could go …
Michael Bluhm: What’s happening behind these new weapons tests?
Thomas Evans
This article is for members only
Join to read on and have access to The Signal‘s full library.
