Kim Jong Un escalates tensions as Trump offers talks

In the corridors of the Blue House, the government building in Seoul, a rather cynical view has recently taken hold: as long as North Korea is engaged with Russia against Ukraine, it will devote less attention to South Korea. It is a fragile belief, and hardly strategic. Yesterday, just a few hours after US President Donald Trump proposed reopening direct negotiations with the Pyongyang regime, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un launched around ten short-range ballistic missiles from the coast of the capital towards the Sea of Japan; they travelled some three hundred kilometres before sinking. The dictator’s powerful sister, Kim Yo Jong, had recently issued a statement saying that no response had been given to Washington regarding the talks. According to several experts, however, there is a glimmer of hope: a source at Il Foglio familiar with North Korean diplomacy maintains that the leadership might sit down at the table with Trump once again, on one condition: that the United States definitively abandon the premise of denuclearisation, effectively accepting North Korea as a nuclear power. 

Trump is a businessman; he needs at least some semblance of diplomatic success, given the quagmire in the Middle East. He is used to talking and, indeed, gets on very well with diplomatic manipulators such as the Pakistanis; all in all, he understands the North Korean language of blackmail. The problem in this case is understanding what the Pyongyang regime might want now, given that it no longer needs an easing of economic sanctions because, in recent years, Russia, together with China, has worked to ensure that all systems designed to prevent their circumvention have been eliminated. As early as the end of July, South Korea’s progressive administration under President Lee Jae-myung had announced its intention to drop North Korean denuclearisation as a priority, accepting the ‘harsh reality’ – as Lee put it – namely that from now on, negotiations with Pyongyang can only aim to limit the production of warheads, but not their elimination. The problem is that international intelligence does not even know how many of these bombs there are. The day before yesterday, Trump quoted a figure – "fifty-seven very powerful nuclear weapons" – and Jeffrey Lewis, one of the leading non-proliferation analysts, pointed out that it is a strange figure. Because it is too precise, and intelligence on nuclear arsenals is always expressed in estimates. Moreover, and most importantly, 57 might be too low a figure. The South Korean Ministry of Defence itself mentioned the day before yesterday that there are at least 80–100 nuclear warheads. According to Lewis, there is also the issue of the enormous stockpile of fissile material, with new facilities and infrastructure at Yongbyon and Kangson, and the massive missile production programme, including new ICBMs, solid-fuelled ballistic missiles, Hwasong-11s and other tactical systems capable of carrying nuclear warheads: “Is North Korea really deploying such a huge number of missiles to be armed with just 57 warheads?”

And those missiles are a cause for concern, as they are becoming increasingly effective, thanks to the experience gained in the field against Russia. Analyst Vann H. Van Diepen wrote on 38th North that the Hwasong-11 short-range tactical ballistic missile has been deployed against Ukraine since the end of 2023, and “initially suffered from reliability and accuracy issues”. Then something changed, probably because Moscow helped the North Koreans overcome the problem of Ukrainian electronic warfare. This means, the analyst writes, “that North Korea’s long-range missiles are likely to be more effective in any future conflict on the peninsula”. The day before yesterday, the South Korean Ministry of Defence was forced to admit for the first time that North Korea has deployed its 600-millimetre “super-large multiple rocket launchers” along the 38th parallel – a system that the United States classifies as a short-range ballistic missile and which Pyongyang claims it can arm with nuclear warheads. Analysts see this as a shift in North Korea’s military posture, increasingly geared towards bringing both conventional and nuclear strike capabilities to the front line, using mobile systems that are difficult to neutralise and designed to overwhelm the South’s defences. Trump wants to talk to Kim again, but the North Korean regime has prepared to sit down at the negotiating table with a military force far more powerful than the one it brought to the table the first time.