North Korea makes nuclear weapons status part of constitution

North Korea’s rubber-stamp legislature has written into the country’s constitution the country’s position as a nuclear weapons power, official media announced Thursday.

“The DPRK’s nuclear force-building policy has been made permanent as the basic law of the state, which no one is allowed to flout with anything,” leader Kim Jong Un said at a meeting of the State People’s Assembly that was held Tuesday and Wednesday, the KCNA news agency said.

The country’s official name is abbreviated as DPRK.

North Korea has performed a record number of missile tests this year, and tensions with South Korea and the United States remain strained, with Pyongyang threatening to undertake its first nuclear test since 2017. It has held six in total since 2006.

The assembly enacted a statute designating North Korea to be a nuclear weapons state a year ago, and Kim stated that this status was “irreversible.” This new law also permitted the use of nuclear weapons as a deterrent.

Now, depressing expectations for denuclearisation even more, the legislature has gone so far as to include nuclear weapons status in the constitution itself.

“This is a historic event that provided a powerful political lever for remarkably strengthening the national defense capabilities,” Kim said, according to KCNA.

Kim also said the United States, South Korea and Japan had formed a “triangular military alliance” and this “finally resulted in the emergence of the ‘Asian-version NATO’, the root cause of war and aggression.”

“This is just the worst actual threat, not threatening rhetoric or an imaginary entity,” Kim said.

North Korea has conducted a string of banned weapons tests so far this year, the last one involving two short-range ballistic missiles on September 13 as Kim prepared to travel to Russia for a summit with President Vladimir Putin.

It also last month failed in its second attempt to put a spy satellite into orbit.

South Korea and the United States have ramped up defence cooperation in response, staging joint exercises as well as naval drills with Japan.

Relations between the two Koreas are at their lowest point in years, and diplomacy is stalled after failed attempts to discuss Pyongyang’s denuclearisation.

On September 2, North Korea staged a “simulated tactical nuclear attack” drill with mock atomic warheads attached to two long-range cruise missiles that were test-fired into the ocean, KCNA reported.

It said the operation was a “counteraction drill” in response to joint military activity by US and South Korean forces that the agency said had escalated tensions in the region.

Kim’s visit to Russia — his first abroad since the coronavirus pandemic — fanned Western fears that Moscow and Pyongyang will defy sanctions and strike an arms deal.

Moscow is believed to be interested in buying North Korean ammunition to continue fighting in Ukraine, while Pyongyang wants Russia’s help to develop its internationally condemned missile programme.