While Donald Trump rages against Iran’s defiant ayatollahs, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un is laughing louder than ever. And why not? North Korea has long since become a nuclear power, and Trump – supposedly the greatest man under heaven – has no choice but to accept it.
Earlier this week, “the Supreme Leader” sent yet another long-range missile into the sky. According to North Korean media, the test launch was “highly successful.” “With a deafening roar and a raging tail of fire, the missile announced that North Korea will not be subdued,” reports from the capital Pyongyang declared. Kim watched the event from a control room together with his daughter, Kim Ju Ae. It is being speculated that the 13-year-old girl has been designated as her father’s successor.
That the test launch took place while the United States is trying to bomb Iran into capitulation was hardly a coincidence. Kim Jong-un wants to tell the world that he himself feels secure, and that no power, not even the United States, will be able to force him to his knees.
And that is not all: North Korea’s missile program has become so advanced that the country’s intercontinental missiles can strike targets in the United States. Designed to fly up to 15,000 kilometers, they could in the worst case destroy several of America’s largest cities, even Washington, D.C. How precise and reliable the missiles would be in wartime is uncertain, but the program has clearly progressed far enough for North Korea to feel safer than ever.
Before Donald Trump became president in 2017, he promised to put Kim Jong-un in his place. He called him “Little Rocket Man” and said he would respond with “fire and fury” if Kim dared to threaten the United States. But once Trump moved into the White House, they began writing letters to each other. After some time Trump said he had received 25 “beautiful letters” from Kim, and at a press conference in 2018 he suddenly declared: “We fell in love.”
Shortly before that, they had met face to face in Singapore. The meeting was sufficiently successful that they agreed to meet again in Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi. But this time complications arose, and Trump returned home earlier than planned.
Still, they made another attempt in June 2019, when they met at the border between North and South Korea. The event was described as historic, since never before had an American president done anything like it. Trump’s praise of Kim was meant to achieve an agreement on North Korean nuclear disarmament. But Kim demanded guarantees and concessions that the United States could not provide, and thus the “love affair” was over.
Many years have passed, and Trump appears to have put North Korea in a drawer. During the same period the North Koreans have continued their military buildup at full speed. It is believed that the regime spends between twenty and thirty percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on military purposes. The billions that go to the nuclear program are financed outside the official budget. It is therefore not surprising that the rest of the economy struggles, and that millions of Kim’s subjects live in poverty.
The regime in Pyongyang conducted its first nuclear test in 2006. In the years that followed it continued to test ever larger bombs, and in 2017 it shocked the world by testing what experts believe was a hydrogen bomb. That same year North Korea began test-launching intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) capable of reaching the American mainland.
Three years later, the North Koreans unveiled their largest ICBM to date, the Hwasong-17. With a range of 15,000 kilometers, it can potentially reach the entire United States. Experts also believe that it could theoretically carry several warheads. It is transported on an enormous vehicle with eleven axles, making it harder to detect before launch.
North Korea’s newest and most advanced intercontinental missile is the Hwasong-18. The most important difference is that it uses solid fuel rather than liquid fuel, which has several disadvantages. If the newest missiles follow a normal intercontinental trajectory, the flight time to the United States would be between twenty and forty minutes—depending on the target. The flight time to Washington, D.C., is estimated at less than forty minutes.
Experts believe that North Korea today possesses between thirty and sixty nuclear warheads. In a few years, according to several analyses, the country could have many more and be able to produce much larger quantities of plutonium and highly enriched uranium. This means it could develop into a medium-sized nuclear power. In other words, North Korea’s nuclear program represents a far greater danger to the United States than Iran’s, which has never come close to North Korea’s level.
In 2022 North Korea adopted a new law on the country’s nuclear forces. It was presented by Kim Jong-un and is considered the clearest formulation of the regime’s nuclear doctrine so far. The law states that North Korea is a permanent nuclear state and that its nuclear weapons cannot be negotiated away. In other words, Pyongyang no longer regards nuclear weapons as a temporary bargaining chip, but as a permanent part of the state’s defense.
Previously, North Korea said that nuclear weapons would only be used in retaliation. The new doctrine opens the door to first use in certain situations, for example if the regime is threatened and “the leadership of the state” is in danger. This makes the doctrine more flexible—and therefore more worrying.
Today the United States has only one system specifically designed to stop intercontinental missiles from countries such as North Korea. It is a missile defense system that attempts to shoot down the missile while it is traveling through space. Launches are first detected by American satellites and then tracked by radar installations in Japan, Alaska, and California. But decision-makers cannot wait too long before deciding to act.
If North Korea or others were to launch an attack, the United States would respond by firing several interceptor missiles at the same target. If one misses, another might hit. But the system is not perfect, and the United States is never completely safe. On the other hand, the U.S. could respond with its own weapons—but at the risk of ending up in a war with North Korea’s close neighbor, China.
The costs would therefore be extremely high for both sides. In practice, this means that Donald Trump and his successors in the White House must live with an uncomfortable reality: North Korea is a nuclear power.
