North Korea's Nuclear Signalling: Context and Implications

If Kim Jong Un grabbed international headlines in 2018 and 2019 for his summitry with Trump and the possibility of a scaled-down nuclear programme, he is now back in the news for his efforts to help Putin sustain the drawn-out war in Ukraine. Perhaps North Korea’s state-run propaganda is not exaggerating when it boasts of the country’s increased international “prestige” and its ability to “exercise enormous influence” on global politics.[1]

For all its destabilising ramifications, Pyongyang’s deep involvement in the war alongside Moscow ironically has scored one achievement: forcing the North Korea problem toward the top of the global security agenda. Yet, the “North Korea problem” extends far beyond the immediacy of the country’s weapons supplies and troop dispatch to Russia or the quid pro quo for the North. At its core, it is about North Korea’s intentions toward its nuclear programme. 

The first step to understanding North Korea’s intentions toward its nuclear programme is to examine its nuclear rhetoric. Based on this assessment, we can track Pyongyang’s foreign policy calculus and, by natural extension, the implications of North Korea’s nuclear and foreign policy for regional and global security. This essay will start with the collapse of the second US-North Korea summit in Hanoi in early 2019, due to its significance for North Korea’s nuclear and foreign policy.

This article argues that North Korea’s nuclear signalling has become tougher every year since the failure of the Hanoi summit; the hardening of North Korea’s nuclear signalling is consistent with its foreign policy reorientation trends; and that North Korea now poses greater proliferation challenges due to the war in Ukraine and perceived opportunities in the shifting global order.  

Evolution of Post-Hanoi Nuclear Signalling

After a “successful launch” of the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) Hwasong-15 and Kim Jong Un’s declaration of “completing the state nuclear force” in November 2017, North Korea embarked on a path of diplomacy in 2018.[2] This led to the first North Korea-US summit in Singapore in June 2018 and the second summit in Hanoi in early 2019. North Korea largely refrained from engaging in weapons tests or nuclear rhetoric during that time. Since the collapse of the Hanoi summit, however, its nuclear rhetoric – and policy -- have gradually hardened.

2019-2020: Nuclear Development Back to the Fore but Denuclearisation Not Ruled Out

North Korea resumed missile launches following the failure of the Hanoi summit.[3] Yet, Kim, while blaming the United States for the summit’s failure, left the door open for talks by urging it to present a new deal by the end of the year.[4] No progress had been made in US-North Korea relations by the end of 2019. Accordingly, at a year-end Party plenary meeting in 2019, Kim declared that North Korea would “steadily develop necessary and prerequisite strategic weapons,” a reference to missiles and nuclear weapons.[5] Kim said this was to cope with a “long confrontation” with the United States, suggesting that its nuclear development was a longer-term goal. However, Kim indicated that denuclearisation may be possible at some point depending on US policy by saying “if the U.S. persists in its hostile policy towards the DPRK, there will never be the denuclearisation on the Korean peninsula.”[6]

North Korea in 2020 continued to signal that nuclear development remained central to its policy, all the while not completely closing the door to denuclearisation at some point.[7]

2021: Reaffirming Long-Term Nuclear Development; Denuclearisation All but off the Table

The Eighth Party Congress in January 2021 was a major milestone in North Korea’s nuclear policy.[8] At this meeting, Kim emphasised that “our national defence capability must be steadily bolstered along the track of new development” and announced a five-year defence development plan that was heavily focused on advancing nuclear capabilities. Notably, Kim for the first time publicly acknowledged North Korea’s development of tactical nuclear weapons, which target South Korea and US forces in South Korea.

North Korea’s readout of the Eighth Party Congress did not mention “denuclearisation.” Yet, Kim said a “new DPRK-US relationship” would be possible if Washington withdrew its “hostile policy,” which seemed to suggest that Pyongyang did not completely rule out nuclear talks with the United States. The heavy nuclear focus of the country’s five-year defence plan, however, appeared to suggest that denuclearisation was all but off the table.

2022: Cementing Irreversibility of Nuclear Status, Renouncing Denuclearisation

North Korea’s nuclear signalling underwent a pivotal change in 2022. North Korea in January of that year in effect lifted the self-imposed moratorium on longer-range missile launches and nuclear testing and resumed firing intercontinental ballistic missiles in March.[9] Accordingly, since early 2022, there has been a significant uptick in references to “nuclear” in Kim Jong Un’s speeches or North Korean media reports on his guidance of weapons tests and launches.

Nuclear rhetoric also became tougher and more aggressive. At a military parade in April 2022, for example, Kim for the first time mentioned the “second mission” of North Korean nuclear weapons, implying a pre-emptive nuclear strike.[10] This marked a major shift from its 2013 nuclear law, which limited the scope of North Korea’s nuclear use to deterrence. In September, North Korea revised this law to expand the scope of nuclear use.[11] On the same day that the new law was promulgated, Kim said that “the position of our state as a nuclear nation has become irreversible” thanks to the new law.[12] In the same speech, he said “there will never be such a thing as our abandonment of the nuclear weapons or denuclearisation first,” in effect renouncing denuclearisation.[13]

2023-2024: Elevating Nuclear Use Rhetoric to New Heights

North Korea’s use of the term “nuclear weapons” increased significantly in 2023, with Kim himself specifically mentioning the possibility of nuclear weapons use.[14] North Korea since the Party plenary meeting in December 2022 has also emphasised “war preparations” and increased production of weapons.[15] In September 2023, Pyongyang built on its nuclear law revision of the previous year and codified into the constitution continued strengthening of nuclear weapons.[16]

North Korea’s nuclear signalling culminated in Kim’s first publicised visit to a uranium enrichment facility in September 2024, whose message was unequivocally clear: that its nuclear capabilities are already strong and will only continue to grow.[17] It should also be noted that North Korea’s threat of nuclear use against South Korea became unusually direct in the fall of 2024, with Kim warning that “the DPRK will use without hesitation all the striking forces in its possession, including nuclear weapons,” if South Korea uses military force to violate the North’s sovereignty.[18] In the past, North Korea typically used the “second mission” of nuclear weapons, a more indirect formulation.

The Foreign Policy Connection

There is a strong correlation between North Korea’s increased nuclear rhetoric and its foreign policy reorientation following the collapse of the Hanoi summit.

The collapse of the Hanoi summit was a humiliating experience for Kim Jong Un. Weeks after the summit, Kim brought back as a key policy “self-reliance,” a concept tantamount to diplomatic isolation.[19] Soon after, North Korea began to reinforce central control across the political, economic and social realms. The Party plenary meeting in December 2019 and the Eighth Party Congress in January 2021, both of which pointed to North Korea’s longer-term intent to continue nuclear development, signalled that the Hanoi summit triggered a change in Pyongyang’s policy toward the United States. Kim’s September 2022 speech rejecting denuclearisation marked a fundamental shift in North Korea’s foreign policy, which for more than three decades had centred on normalising relations with the United States through denuclearisation.[20]

Pyongyang’s foreign policy reorientation extended beyond the United States; it included a fundamental shift in North Korea’s three-decade policy of nonalignment with China and Russia.[21] The foreign policy shift was not only caused by the Hanoi summit’s failure but also great-power competition and North Korea’s changed perception of US global leadership. In the summer of 2021 – by which time North Korea had started recalibrating its policy toward the United States -- its Foreign Ministry website closely followed the chaotic US pullout from Afghanistan and portrayed the United States as a “declining power.”[22] It was also in August in 2021 that the North Korean Foreign Ministry website started to support Chinese and Russian positions on various international and foreign policy issues, which would turn out to be a key signal of Pyongyang’s reorientation of foreign policy.[23] It was probably not a coincidence that Kim Jong Un, for the first time, publicly mentioned a “neo-Cold War” in a speech to the parliament the following month.[24]

One important takeaway here is that the pivot in North Korea’s policy toward Russia did not start with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, although the event accelerated it. It should be noted that North Korea’s resumption of ICBM launches for the first time since November 2017, its nuclear law revision and Kim’s public renunciation of denuclearisation in 2022 all took place after the start of the war in Ukraine.[25] It is difficult to say whether North Korea would have refrained from or delayed these actions had the war not erupted in early 2022. The timing, however, suggests the war had at least some impact on shaping Kim’s policy toward the United States. As Pyongyang’s relations with Russia continued to deepen and flourish in 2023 and 2024, culminating in the signing of the new North Korea-Russia treaty and North Korea’s dispatch of troops to Russia, its nuclear rhetoric continued to harden. In a speech at a defence exhibition in November 2024, Kim stated that North Korea “already did everything possible in the bilateral negotiations with the United States,” which seemed to rule out engagement with the incoming Trump administration, at least for the foreseeable future.[26]

North Korea’s introduction of tactical nuclear weapons at the Eighth Party Congress did not occur in a vacuum, nor did its implicit expansion of nuclear strike targets in the 2022 nuclear law to include South Korea. Like all major North Korea policy changes in recent years, Pyongyang’s policy toward Seoul began to shift in the wake of the Hanoi summit’s collapse. North Korea on multiple occasions expressed betrayal against the South and strongly rejected any South Korean attempt at intervening in US-North Korea relations.[27] Unification, a prevalent theme in North Korean propaganda for decades, virtually vanished from the country’s authoritative media outlets in late 2019.

The 2022 nuclear law probably necessitated reestablishing South Korea as a foreign state (as opposed to keeping it as part of the Korean nation with which it should eventually reunify) in order to enable North Korea’s use of nuclear weapons against South Korea if needed. In July 2023, North Korea began referring to South Korea by its formal name, the “ROK (Republic of Korea),” which would turn out to be a key move to define the South as a foreign country.[28] In December 2023, Kim formally renounced the country’s decades-old policy of peaceful unification with South Korea; the following month, he defined South Korea as a “primary enemy state and invariable principal enemy”[29] As a follow-on measure, North Korea in October 2024 appears to have defined South Korea as “a completely hostile state” in its constitution.[30] Kim’s direct threat of nuclear use against South Korea – and his clarification that the North’s use of physical force against South Korea would be “a lawful retaliatory action against the enemy state, not the fellow countrymen” -- should be understood against this backdrop.[31]

Implications and Conclusion

A constant theme of North Korea’s nuclear rhetoric since August 2023 has been to bolster and modernise the munitions and defence industries.[32] The emphasis on these two industries, which began just after then Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu’s visit to Pyongyang and shortly before North Korea began shipping munitions to Russia, indicates that Kim’s repeated calls for increasing weapons production are just as much (if not more) for weapons exports as they are for domestic consumption.[33] If Kim’s goal is to improve the civilian economy by revitalising its munitions and defence industries – and it appears to be, given the level of emphasis on them – North Korea will likely attempt to keep up and even increase its weapons exports.

In that vein, Pyongyang’s provision of weapons to Russia renews concerns about North Korea’s long-established role in global proliferation.[34] One of the many troubling aspects of burgeoning Pyongyang-Moscow relations is that North Korea may seek to identify new clients for its weapons and weapons technology by taking advantage of its connection with Russia. Additionally, the gaping loopholes in the international sanctions regime against North Korea, primarily due to China’s reluctance to enforce and Russia’s flat-out violations of them, almost certainly will enable and embolden North Korea to expand its illegal weapons exports without worrying about any meaningful consequences.[35] 

Zooming into the prospects of North Korea’s engagement with the second Trump administration, Pyongyang’s ongoing nuclear signalling and foreign policy trends indicate that there would be little to no substantial progress even if the two sides were to resume nuclear talks. Kim made it clear in September 2022 that denuclearisation was out of the question, and the message has since remained consistent. In that same September 2022 speech, he also said if his nuclear policy were to change, “the political and military environment on the Korean peninsula” would have to change. He did not elaborate on what a “change” on the Korean peninsula might look like. However, a review of past North Korean official statements and media commentaries suggests that it amounts to the removal of US extended deterrence, which includes, but is not limited to, US military personnel and assets on the Korean peninsula and US-South Korea joint military exercises. 

This may seem an outlandish condition even for Kim Jong Un. We must recall, however, that Washington has virtually no leverage over North Korea in the current strategic environment, where North Korea sees opportunities amid the shifting global order and its deepening relations with Moscow. In South Korea, Trump’s victory in the 2024 US presidential election has already reignited the “nuclear debate,” or a debate over whether South Korea should acquire its own nuclear capability to deter North Korea’s growing threat.[36] Should the Trump administration prioritise risk reduction and make a proposal to Kim that significantly impacts US forces in South Korea, it could result in Seoul losing faith in US extended deterrence and seeking its own nuclear capability.

The current geopolitical situation could not be better for Kim Jong Un as he continues to advance his weapons programmes and seeks to improve the economy by revitalising the munitions and defence industries. Unless there is a drastic change in North Korea’s external environment or regime instability, Kim will have little to no reason to engage the United States, the West or South Korea.