North Korea has even amended its constitution to require an immediate nuclear strike if leader Kim Jong-un is killed or incapacitated during a hostile assault that threatens the country’s nuclear command system.
In fact, North Korea has rewritten its constitution to call for an automatic nuclear attack if leader Kim Jong-un is killed or incapacitated by an international enemy, The Telegraph said citing a briefing by South Korea’s National Knowledge Solution (NIS).
The constitutional change is in the fallout from the combined US-Israeli assault on Iran that killed supreme leader Ali Khamenei and other top aides, a process that seems to have greatly unnerved the Pyongyang leadership.
The action has actually drawn comparisons to Russia’s Cold War-era “Dead Hand” system, formally called Border. The system was built by the Soviet Union during the Cold War to automatically launch a retaliatory nuclear strike if Soviet leadership and command structures were hit in an enemy attack. North Korea’s new policy seems to embrace a similar deterrence logic: if Kim Jong-un is killed, Pyongyang still wants the world to believe its nuclear response will still be unstoppable.
The change was welcomed throughout the very first session of North Korea’s 15th Supreme Individuals’s Setting up, which started up on March 22 in Pyongyang. NIS officers announced the changes Thursday in a meeting for senior South Korean government officials.
Under the revised Article 3 of North Korea’s nuclear plan regulation, if hostile strikes threaten the country’s nuclear command-and-control system, a retaliatory nuclear strike should be conducted “automatically and instantly.” Kim retains direct command of the nuclear forces, but the amendment legally sets up processes for retaliation even if he is unable to issue instructions personally.
North Korea probably had such backup preparations at the ready, but chose to hardwire them into legislation after witnessing the attacks on Iran unravel with astonishing speed, said teacher Andrei Lankov, a chronicler and international connections expert at Kookmin College in Seoul. ““Iran was a wake-up call,” Lankov said, noting that North Korea observed how quickly the number of top Iranian officials was whittled down in worked with assaults. He said that Pyongyang is probably “scared” of a comparable decapitation attack right now.
Still, experts believe it would be far harder to carry out such a surgery in North Korea than in Iran. The country’s frontiers remain strongly guarded, worldwide diplomats and site visitors are securely screened, and Pyongyang’s constrained CCTV facilities and isolated internet make the type of intelligence celebration purportedly used in Tehran tricky to replicate.
Kim , who is famous for his security and safety , doesn’t often fly and usually travels by fully armored train with his bodyguards . Paranoia is not only a personal attribute in North Koreait is almost governmental policy.
Lankov said that Pyongyang’s biggest problem is probably satellite surveillance technology, and that any move to get rid of the North Korean leadership at the outset of a war would be certain. He also said that any retaliation strike would very surely be targeted at the United States, rather than South Korea, since he sees little chance of Seoul initiating such an assault.
The constitutional change comes as North Korea maintains its militaristic hard line toward South Korea despite current peace overtures from Seoul. In fact, Pyongyang has always described the South as its main enemy and has removed from its constitution long-standing references to Korean reunification.
Simultaneously, North Korea declared plans to install a new kind of long-range artillery along the inter-Korean border. Kim recently inspected manufacturing of a “new-type 155-millimetre self-propelled gun-howitzer” at an artilleries facility, state media source KCNA said.
The artillery system has a range exceeding 37 miles and will be deployed this year to long-range artillery units along the border with South Korea, KCNA said. The variant would undoubtedly bring downtown Seoul, around 35 miles from the border, along with huge areas of the massively populated Gyeonggi province, within striking reach.
KCNA quoted Kim as stating that the brand-new rifle would definitely deliver “significant adjustments and advantages” to North Korean ground operations.
Technically, North and South Korea are still at war since the Korean War of 1950-1953 concluded in an armistice rather than a peace treaty.
