Abstract:
North Korea’s renewed nuclear and ICBM tests in 2017 are a significant development. Kim Jong-un has boasted that his country now has the capacity to strike targets anywhere in the world, prompting a series of apocalyptic threats from Donald Trump, including that he may be forced to ‘totally destroy’ North Korea in order to defend the United States and its allies. Until July 2017, a number of tests had failed or achieved only a short distance. Clearly, while the imbalance of nuclear power between the United States and North Korea remains extreme, the escalating pace of North Korean tests, as well as their increasing sophistication and success, suggests that a new phase has been reached in what US policy-makers have consistently termed the ‘North Korea nuclear problem’.
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