To do or not to do: Pyongyang’s seventh nuclear test calculations

Never has there been such a long waiting period in the lead-up to a country’s nuclear test as North Korea’s seventh nuclear test. Leader Kim Jong-un set the stage by announcing at the Eighth Party Congress in January 2021 a wishlist of nuclear capabilities to be acquired over the next five years (KCNA 2021a). The expert community and governments then offered a string of assessments throughout 2022 on signs of Pyongyang’s preparations for a nuclear test, giving rise to suspense and speculation over when it might be conducted, for what purposes, and what its implications might be. And just like that, North Korea’s seventh nuclear test became a fait accompli—a matter of when, not if.

But the most interesting question about North Korea, however, is not what it will do or when it will do it, but why.

A nuclear test often is as political as it is technical. North Korea’s second nuclear test in May 2009 almost certainly was driven by the need to assert Kim Jong-il’s strength domestically and externally after his stroke the previous summer—a situation that led to his unusually long public absence, and rampant speculation about his health and the fate of his regime (Shin 2008). Managing perceptions of the leader’s status was particularly critical at home for ensuring a smooth transition of power to the third son, Kim Jong-un, which was already in full swing. The third nuclear test in February 2013 marked a powerful prelude to Kim Jong-un’s launch the following month of one of his first major policies: byungjin, or the parallel development of nuclear forces and the economy (KCNA 2013). It is hard to conceive that Pyongyang accidentally chose the date of its sixth nuclear test in September 2017, which coincided with the opening of a BRICS summit in China (Philips 2017). It not only reflected the poor state of relations between the two countries; it may have also been a message to the world that China had no influence on North Korea’s strategic decisions.

These past examples underscore the intricacies of domestic and external politics that play into Pyongyang’s decisions on nuclear testing, going beyond the technical aspects of such tests. Accordingly, I will examine the domestic and foreign policy environments that could inform and shape Kim Jong-un’s decision on a seventh nuclear test.

But first, let’s start with a brief overview of North Korea’s hardening of the lines across all policy realms following the collapse of the second North Korea-US summit in Hanoi in 2019, which marked the starting point for renewing and escalating the country’s nuclear drive. In particular, we should zero in on two areas—one domestic and one foreign policy—that could serve as key indicators of Kim’s decision on nuclear testing: Pyongyang’s approach to the civilian economy as opposed to national defense, and the reorientation of its foreign and South Korea policies. The article will conclude with what we might look out for in 2024 and beyond.

Post-Hanoi policy reset

North Korea’s nuclear capabilities have grown and evolved not only in technical terms. Kim made sure his nuclear arsenals—and the irreversibility of North Korea’s status as a “nuclear nation”—had legal support and institutional legitimacy in the forms of a nuclear doctrine and the constitution (KCNA 2022a; KCNA 2022b; KCNA 2023a). Furthermore, Pyongyang’s emboldened nuclear rhetoric constantly reminds audiences at home and abroad that it can and will use its nuclear weapons if need be.

For example, in a speech to a military parade in April 2022, Kim broadened the mission of North Korea’s nuclear weapons from deterrence to use, which was codified in a new nuclear doctrine five months later (KCNA 2022c). Building on these moves, North Korea since early 2023 has played up the possibility of what it calls a “nuclear crisis” and conducted drills simulating nuclear attacks and counterattacks (KCNA 2023b; KCNA 2023c). It is in this vein that Kim escalated rhetoric at a Party plenary meeting in December 2023, calling for “mobilizing all physical means and forces including nuclear forces” in a contingency and explicitly urging “the People’s Army and the munitions industry, nuclear weapons and civil defense sectors to further accelerate the war preparations” (KCNA 2023d; KCNA 2023e). In contrast, in his speech at the same year-end event in 2022, Kim only implied the possibility of wider-ranging mobilization (Carlin and Lee 2023).

No country makes decisions in a vacuum: There is always a context. To understand North Korea’s nuclear-related decisions and actions in recent years, it is important to assess its reaction to the collapse of the Hanoi Summit, including its attempt to readjust its domestic and foreign policy course in the event’s aftermath.

The hardening of lines and what North Korea calls “long-term confrontation” with the United States have underpinned the country’s post-Hanoi policies. The summit’s collapse appears to have had a profound impact on the psyche of the country’s leadership, including Kim himself. More than that, it almost certainly was viewed by the country’s top echelons as a vulnerability for Kim’s leadership. Indeed, the regime conducted an unprecedented leadership campaign in the months following the Hanoi summit in an apparent attempt to preserve the infallibility of Kim’s leadership (Lee 2019a). One month after the summit, Kim summoned back “self-reliance” as a key policy, proclaiming the country’s “confrontation” with the United States was “bound to be drawn out” (KCNA 2019a; KCNA 2019b). This paved the way for North Korea to reinforce central control across all sectors, from political and economic to social, and adopt a harder-line foreign policy in the face of a protracted confrontation with the United States. Pyongyang likely viewed trends of liberalization—made possible by Kim’s ruling style of delegating responsibility and decision-making, market-oriented initiatives, and, in his early years of rule, receptiveness to foreign culture—as not only antitheses of self-reliance but also potential risks for the Kim regime as it was hunkering down for a longer-term diplomatic showdown with Washington (Carlin and Lee 2022; Kim 2012).

Politically, the country has stepped up calls for strengthening ideology and discipline and the role of the Party (Lee 2019b; KCNA 2022d; KCNA 2023f). The Party in North Korea generally has been associated with tradition and conservatism, and emphasis on the Party usually points to harder-line policies. In the economic sector, North Korea has taken steps toward greater centralization. In line with that move, North Korea has de-emphasized reform-oriented measures that Kim Jong-un had begun implementing in the early years of his rule. In the social realm, North Korea passed a “law on rejecting reactionary ideology and culture,” the main goal of which was to block the inflow and consumption of South Korean cultural content (KCNA 2020a; Jang 2021). North Korea made a yet more conservative shift at a year-end Party plenary meeting in 2022, where Kim scorned dependence on foreign technology, which he once found not only acceptable but even encouraged (Carlin and Lee 2023). (It should be noted that North Korea’s drive toward greater central control was aided by the three-plus years of border lockdowns to prevent or manage a COVID outbreak.)

The Hanoi Summit began to impact Pyongyang’s foreign and defense policy almost immediately. Missile launches resumed and Kim’s military inspections increased soon afterward (Lee 2019c). This time, however, North Korea did not stop at taking a harder-line policy on Washington. North Korea appears to have reoriented its foreign policy as a whole, the signs of which began to manifest themselves in the summer of 2021. In line with its changed foreign policy, Kim during the year-end Party plenary meeting in 2023 announced a fundamental shift in its South Korea policy (KCNA 2023e).

Politics of the economy

One overlooked but key indicator of Pyongyang’s current and future thinking on national defense is its stance on the civilian economy, including economic reform-oriented measures.

In looking at North Korea’s past nuclear tests, for example, there is a correlation between economic policy and nuclear testing. All past six nuclear tests were conducted when the civilian economy took a backseat to national defense. By the time North Korea carried out the first two tests in 2006 and 2009, Kim Jong-il had already started putting the brakes on the economic reform initiatives he had launched in July 2002 (Han 2020). The remaining four tests were carried out shortly before (February 2013) or during (2016 and 2017) the byungjin era (2013-2018). The civilian economy was, at least officially, on a par with national defense during byungjin. North Korea attempted to simultaneously rejuvenate the economy while accelerating nuclear development by formulating and rolling out economic reforms across the agricultural, industrial, and financial sectors. The economy did see improved productivity—yet, in the end, North Korea’s civilian economy lagged in comparison with North Korea’s significant nuclear advancements (Jo 2021; Ha 2018; Bank of Korea n.d.). This shows that the more national resources are channeled to national defense, the less there remains for reform initiatives that could help revitalize the civilian economy—a classic “guns or butter” dilemma.

North Korea in April 2018 declared the “victory” of byungjin and shifted to what it called a “new strategic line” of “concentrating all efforts” on the economy (KCNA 2018). Although North Korea has not announced a return to byungjin, the top leadership’s emphasis on national defense since the Eighth Party Congress would seem to signal that it has—or possibly to something even worse (KCNA 2021a; KCNA 2021b).

Since the December 2022 Party plenum’s call for “an exponential increase of the country’s nuclear arsenal,” North Korean media have introduced themes and concepts, some from the days of Kim Jong-il’s songun, or “military-first” policy, that in effect justify the civilian economy giving way in favor of national defense (KCNA 2023g). In the months following the plenum, the official, state-run government daily newspaper published two rare articles discussing a touchy question—the balance between accumulation (investment) and consumption—and explicitly called for prioritizing accumulation (Ri 2023; Minju Joson 2023). Proponents of accumulation support investment in the country’s future, such as national defense, while those who call for consumption prefer to satisfy the people’s immediate material needs. North Korea traditionally has raised the accumulation/consumption question when it seeks to pivot away from reform or justify increased defense spending (Carlin and Lee 2021). Notably, both articles were published in Minju Joson, the daily publication of the cabinet, which has been the beacon of reform-oriented initiatives.

Furthermore, during visits to munitions factories in summer 2023, Kim used a highly unusual term: “national defense economic work” (KCNA 2023h). North Korean academic journals used this rare term in Kim Jong-il’s songun years, when explaining that the then-top state organ, the National Defense Commission, oversaw the “national defense economy” and “national defense economic institutions” (Ho 2003; Ri 2010). Although the exact definition of this formulation remains unclear, it appears to refer to defense industries and civilian industries that feed into the defense industries. It is by no means an accident that Kim himself reintroduced a term that was rarely used publicly even in his father’s songun era, when—despite an attempt at implementing some market-oriented measures—defense-related industries on the whole were given priority and viewed as the key to revving up the national economy.

After taking into account the reappearance of this rare and unusual terminology in state media, it would be logical to conclude that national defense will be the driving force of the North Korean economy (if it isn’t already). This conclusion is supported by such factors as Kim’s emphasis on the munitions industry’s role in buttressing defense industries, and the reining-in of economic reform-oriented initiatives in civilian economic sectors that were implemented during the years ofbyungin (“parallel development”). If this assessment is accurate, then it would signal not just North Korea’s return to byungjin—Pyongyang could be slipping into a Kim Jong-un version of songun (“military-first”). It remains to be seen whether the increased prominence in recent years of the Party’s Central Military Commission—which oversees the country’s military and its defense policy—is simply a part of Kim’s long-standing efforts to institutionalize the Party, or if it portends a wider role for the military in the guise of the Party (KCNA 2022e; Lee 2021).

In that light, an authoritative North Korean Party daily newspaper essay’s unusual glorification of “belt-tightening”—a euphemism for the people’s sacrifice to direct more resources to the defense sector—cannot be dismissed as empty rhetoric (Tong 2023).

Reorientation of foreign and South Korea policies

North Korea’s US policy may have undergone tactical adjustments over the years, but at its core the strategy did not stray from the course Kim Il Sung set more than three decades ago: normalize relations with Washington by working toward denuclearization and use it as a buffer against China and Russia. North Korea’s calculus vis-a-vis the three great powers appears to have changed fundamentally over time since the collapse of the Hanoi summit, however, prompting a reorientation of the country’s three-decade policy of normalization of ties with Washington and, by extension of that, its 30-year policy of nonalignment with Beijing and Moscow.

There has been a string of signals. First came the North Korean Foreign Ministry’s support for China and Russia in the summer of 2021 by way of publishing articles on its website that supported their positions on a wide range of international issues—a conspicuous break from its past practice of running straight news reports on North Korea’s diplomatic exchanges with the two countries. Pyongyang’s pivot to China started earlier, with its unusual endorsement of Beijing on the issues of Hong Kong and Taiwan respectively in 2019 and 2020 (KCNA 2019c; KCNA. 2020b). Pyongyang’s gravitation to Russia was rather sudden and became pronounced after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 (DPRK Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2022a; DPRK Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2022b). Second, after resuming intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) testing in early 2022, Kim Jong-un, in a rare public reference to denuclearization, declared the new nuclear doctrine ensured North Korea’s “nuclear nation” status as being “irreversible” and effectively walked back the country’s three-decade US policy. He said there would never be “our abandonment of the nuclear weapons or denuclearization first, nor will there be any negotiations to this end or bargaining chip,” adding that the country had “drawn the line of no retreat regarding our nuclear weapons so that there will be no longer any bargaining over them” (KCNA 2022b). Previously, Kim said denuclearization would be impossible “if the US persists in its policy hostile towards the DPRK” (KCNA 2020c). North Korea took the irreversibility of its “nuclear nation” status to another level in 2023 by codifying its nuclear policy in its constitution.

The North Korean leadership’s skepticism about the three-decade US policy seems to have been prompted by the conviction that it was in for what it called a “long-term confrontation” with Washington, irrespective of who the president may be. More than that, it was probably intensified by Pyongyang’s conception of waning US leadership on the global stage and the shifting international order, which Kim Jong-un himself publicly recognized in his references to a “new Cold War” and a “multipolar world” (KCNA 2021c; KCNA 2022b). North Korean media have diligently followed US-China competition, the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, the war in Ukraine, and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. Additionally, North Korea not only managed to stay afloat but also appears to have achieved some economic growth in 2023 despite the prolonged self-imposed lockdown and stalemated diplomacy with Washington, which triggered widespread concern about its economy (KCNA 2023e). This likely has emboldened Kim and the leadership circle and may have contributed to their skepticism about the strategic value of the United States for North Korea.

North Korea’s foreign policy reorientation necessitated adjustments to its South Korea policy. For the regime, an official statement clarifying its longer-term policy on South Korea likely was a matter of some urgency owing to its evolving nuclear posture toward South Korea since Kim first called for tactical nuclear development at the Eighth Party Congress in January 2021. And Kim during the 2023 year-end Party plenary meeting fundamentally redefined the very essence of inter-Korean relations and reunification policy by saying “relations between two states hostile to each other and the relations between two belligerent states, not the consanguineous or homogeneous ones any more” (KCNA 2023e). To enable nuclear use on South Korea if and when needed—and the 2022 nuclear law implicitly expands the scope of targets to South Korea—Kim needed to re-establish South Korea as just another foreign state and not part of the Korean nation with which it should eventually reunify.

North Korea appears to have started recalibrating its South Korea and reunification policies before it changed its nuclear posture toward South Korea. Reunification and related themes— daily staples in North Korean media for decades—have virtually vanished from the country’s authoritative outlets following the collapse of the North Korea-US working-level nuclear talks in Sweden in October 2019 (Ahlander and O’Connor 2019). Similarly, the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland, North Korea’s official body overseeing inter-Korean affairs, made no public appearances since August 2019, leading to its abolition shortly after Kim’s 2023 year-end Party meeting speech (KCNA 2024a). In another symbolic move, North Korea’s most authoritative media outlet, the Party daily Rodong Sinmun, in May 2021 closed down its “Fatherland’s Reunification Department,” which had been in existence since March 2007 (and was known as the “South Korea Department” for years before that). In March 2023, the Party daily carried a rare and important “commentator article” on the security situation on and around the Korean Peninsula, which appeared to signal that the Kim regime had come to a major foreign or South Korea policy decision (KCNA 2023i; Carlin 2023). Approximately four months later, North Korea began referring to South Korea by its formal name, the “Republic of Korea (ROK),” one of its first moves to redefine South Korea as a foreign country (KCNA 2023j). This was confirmed by Kim Jong-un’s speech at the year-end Party meeting in 2023.

The road ahead

One of the popular questions associated with the timing or motive of North Korea’s nuclear testing is whether Pyongyang will time it with a US presidential election in the hopes of changing US policy calculus or getting its attention. USpresidential elections were not a factor in the past six tests. Besides, a close examination of North Korea’s authoritative public statements and commentaries in recent years shows that it is not driven by a desire for changing the immediateterms of negotiations but is rather acting on its own strategy and timetable. It may be worth noting that as early as July 2020, then First Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui said North Korea had worked out a “detailed strategic timetable for putting under control the long-term threat from the U.S.” and that Pyongyang would never change its policy “conditional on external parameters like internal political schedule of someone” (KCNA 2020d).

The considerably tougher language on preparedness for a nuclear crisis or contingency and on South Korea delivered by Kim himself at the year-end Party plenum in 2023, one of the country’s most important political events of the year, forebodes dangerous times ahead—and a seventh nuclear test, while it may be significant from a technical point of view, may be one of the less worrisome events. This hardened rhetoric becomes more ominous when understood in tandem with Kim’s call for “further developing the relations with the anti-imperialist independent countries opposed to the hegemony strategy of the U.S. and the West” and “waging a dynamic anti-imperialist joint action and struggle on an international scale.” That implies going beyond a simple policy pivot to countries like China and Russia with which it shares anti-US interests; it points to the possibility of North Korea’s active participation in global conflicts. With that in mind, North Korea’s provision of arms to Russia, while serious in and of itself, may not be the worst of it.

One factor that could have major implications for regional security, possibly including a seventh nuclear test, is North Korea’s stance on China. North Korea’s policy of realignment with China appears unchanged, but its attitude toward China has cooled since North Korea’s Armistice Day celebrations in late July 2023, possibly due to Beijing sending a lower-level delegation (Nam 2023).

North Korea’s relations with Moscow, on the other hand, have risen to new heights, as evidenced by Kim’s travel to Russia upon the country’s reopening of borders and Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui’s meetings with her Russian counterpart Lavrov in Pyongyang and Putin in Moscow (KCNA 2023k; KCNA 2023l; KCNA 2024b).

By contrast, exchanges of vice foreign minister visits were the most memorable diplomatic events between North Korea and China during that same period (KCNA 2023m; KCNA 2024c).

North Korea has a history of playing a balancing act between China and Russia during the Cold War, and if Kim Jong-un is inclined to play by the old playbook, then Pyongyang’s China calculus will affect its already controversial ties with Moscow. And Kim, who seems keen to look for a reliable partner with which it can launch “anti-imperialist joint action and struggle on an international scale,” may be more attracted to the globally isolated Russia, which has less to lose than China. That could potentially spell more trouble for the region and the world, not to mention the fact that China’s influence over North Koreas decision on nuclear testing—if it exists and Beijing has the willingness to exercise it—will be severely limited.