| North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, his daughter and an official watch what Pyongyang says is a test launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile from an undisclosed location in North Korea, undated photo provided by the North Korean government on Dec. 18, 2023 (Korean Central News Agency photo via Korea News Service and AP Images). |
| For more than a decade, North Korea has maintained a secret ballistic missile base near its border with China, which poses “a potential nuclear threat to East Asia and the continental United States.” That’s according to a new analysis of satellite imagery by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. |
| CSIS estimates the base houses a brigade-sized unit equipped with six to nine nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missiles and their mobile launchers. Crucially, those mobile launchers allow the warheads to be dispersed and launched from elsewhere, making them difficult to take out with preemptive strikes in the event of a crisis. |
| Construction on the base is likely to have begun in the mid-2000s—shortly after Pyongyang withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003—and was finished in 2014, with periodic updates to the construction since then. Analysts believe it is one of the country’s 15 to 20 undeclared missile sites. |
| The revelations are an important reminder that while North Korea has faded somewhat from international headlines, it continues to build up its nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities. Indeed, the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un, called for a rapid expansion of the nuclear arsenal this week in response to annual joint U.S.-South Korea military drills that started Monday. Washington and Seoul maintain the exercises are purely defensive, but North Korea has responded to them with provocations in the past, including new weapons tests. |
| Diplomacy with North Korea has been largely frozen—at least publicly—since the breakdown of negotiations between Kim and his U.S. counterpart, Donald Trump, at their summit meeting in Hanoi in 2019. Since returning to office this year, Trump has reportedly tried multiple times to send a letter to Kim via North Korea’s U.N. delegation in New York, only to be rebuffed. Kim has also rejected diplomatic overtures from South Korea’s new president, Lee Jae-myung. |
| This should come as no surprise, for North Korea is in a very different strategic position than during Trump’s first term, as Theresa Lou explained for WPR in May. Crucially, Pyongyang’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine—including the deployment of troops and provision of short-range missiles—opened the door to a deepening military and economic partnership that has “allowed North Korea to diversify away from its traditional reliance on Beijing,” Theresa wrote. |
| The prospect of North Korea returning to the negotiating table is a distant one, but not entirely out of the question. Trump has said he would like to resolve the conflict with North Korea, and Kim’s sister, Kim Yo Jong, acknowledged a few weeks ago that her brother’s relations with Trump are “not bad.” |
| Restarting talks with Kim would require lifting or meaningfully relaxing U.N. sanctions on North Korea in some form. “This is a step only the U.S. could engineer, and in practice only Donald Trump might attempt,” the North Korea analysts Andrei Lankov and Peter Ward wrote this week. If the talks resume, Pyongyang would never agree to give up its nuclear program, but it may be inclined to agree to an arms control agreement, Lankov and Ward added. “Such a deal could offer the regime a means of easing its heavy reliance on China and Russia,” which Kim finds “burdensome.” |
| Kim’s recent rebuffing of U.S. diplomatic overtures may simply indicate that he is waiting for the right carrot to be presented to him. The question, then, would be whether Trump is willing to comply, and return to high-wire talks with an unpredictable adversary. |