of an azure sea. There is Kim with scientists and technicians observing what appears to be a miniaturized nuclear warhead that if successfully put atop a ballistic missile would be a serious threat to the United States and North Korea’s neighbors. There is Kim observing a long-range rocket launch, his back to the camera, the plumes floating majestically against the mountainous landscape. All of these photos sent experts scurrying to ascertain North Korea’s latest nuclear capabilities. Within the first six years of his rule, Kim Jong Un tested three times more missiles than his father and grandfather combined—including new ballistic missiles of various ranges from multiple locations and a submarine-launched version—and conducted four of the North’s six nuclear tests, all before he turned thirty-five years old.
MAKING “MILITARY FIRST” GREAT AGAIN
Not satisfied with just advancing North Korea’s strategic weapons program, Kim Jong Un also sought to selectively modernize its conventional armed forces, which at more than a million soldiers makes it the world’s fourth-largest military. Nearly three-quarters of its armed forces are positioned just thirty-five miles away from the Demilitarized Zone that divides the Koreas, making the peninsula one of the most dangerous places in the world. For context, thirty-five miles is roughly the distance between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, or New York City and Greenwich, Connecticut, the distance of a commute to work that millions of Americans do every day. The North has thousands of forward-deployed and fortified artillery pieces aimed at the South, thirteen hundred aircraft, around seventy submarines, and naval vessels able to support amphibious operations and the insertion of special operations forces, all detailed in “Military and Security Developments Involving the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” a 2017 Defense Department report to Congress.
On paper, the North Korean military is formidable, and given its location, the threats that the regime has made, and the potential for any minor incident to spark a military conflict, it cannot be discounted. Nevertheless, as the Pentagon’s report to Congress noted, the military is operating with aging equipment that was given or produced based on Soviet and Chinese designs from the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, a painful reminder of North Korea’s best days of support from its friends in Moscow and Beijing. Moreover, many of the soldiers fare not much better than the general population in terms of diet and nutrition, and the regime has had to occasionally reduce the minimum height requirement for conscription because of stunted growth that has resulted from the 1990s famine. Around the time of Kim’s ascension, the minimum height was reduced to four feet nine inches. The regime also regularly uses conscripts for nonmilitary activities, including construction projects and agricultural duties.
Kim almost certainly understands the limitations of the military, given that his grooming during the succession process and his personal interest were in this field. And although he probably understands that he is unlikely to win a conventional war against the United States and South Korea, he has not abandoned living up to his father’s ideological legacy of “military first.” Kim has placed a high priority on modernizing some aspects of North Korea’s conventional capabilities, presiding over artillery firepower exercises, fighter pilot competitions, and artillery drills that simulate striking military targets in South Korea. Kim watched a night-combat flight drill and ordered training to be done as if North Korea were in a state of war. The regime has also demonstrated new surface-to-air missile launchers and accompanying radar, debuted missile capabilities that could improve its reach into South Korea, upgraded selected naval ships, and produced missile-armed patrol boats and corvettes. In 2013, the regime also used a drone in a live-fire military drill, suggesting that the Korean People’s Army was trying to incorporate new technologies. Kim could also rely on his 180,000 commandos, the elite special operations forces, who are well-fed, highly motivated, and “designed for rapid offensive operations, internal defense against foreign attacks, or limited attacks against vulnerable targets in [South Korea],” according to the Defense Department’s 2017 report to Congress. In 2016, the regime publicized a simulated special operations forces battalion assault on the Blue House, including helicopter insertions and a mock abduction of the South Korean president.
The regime matched these displays of muscular defiance with its rhetoric. Within Kim’s first year and a half of rule, the regime threatened to attack South Korea “by unprecedented peculiar means and methods of our own style,” the first of many menacing statements. Pyongyang also threatened preemptive nuclear attack against the United States, warned foreign diplomats