In late 2019, Mr. Kim warned that he no longer felt bound by his self-imposed moratorium on nuclear and long-range missile tests. During a Politburo meeting last week, he again suggested that his government might restart its testing of long-range missiles and nuclear devices.
The Significance of North Korea’s Missile Tests
The Biden administration has so far taken no real steps to entice Mr. Kim, other than proposing talks “without preconditions,” a lukewarm entreaty that North Korea has rebuffed.
Amid the latest series of missile tests, Washington has again urged North Korea for talks.
“We have made it very clear to Pyongyang,” Mark Lambert, the United States’ deputy assistant secretary of state for Japan and Korea, said on Wednesday. “We will go anywhere. We will talk about anything. There are no reservations we have.”
“We have to have a serious discussion about the denuclearization of North Korea, and if North Korea is willing to do that, all sorts of promising things can happen,” he said.
North Korea’s latest launch came amid reports that its internet service appeared to have been hit by a second wave of outages in as many weeks, possibly caused by a so-called distributed denial-of-service cyberattack.
In North Korea, only a small group of elites are allowed access to the global internet. Its websites, all state-controlled, carry propaganda for Mr. Kim’s government and report developments, such as its weapons tests, that it wants the world and the North Korean people to be aware of.
