Experts say the close cooperation between its self-proclaimed arch-enemies, Washington and Seoul, is a concern for Kim Jong Un’s regime and may have more missile launches to demonstrate it.
Publicly, “North Korea will undermine the message of reassurance by the US about nuclear deterrence”, Chun In-bum, a retired South Korean army general, told AFP.
But behind closed doors “they will get the message: if they use nuclear weapons it will be the end of the regime”, he said.
Experts said Kim is not going to change track, after spending decades – and a huge chunk of the impoverished country’s GDP – on developing his banned nuclear weapons programmes.
“It is unlikely that North Korea will bow to these threats and give up its nuclear weapons,” Yang Moo-jin, president of the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, told AFP.