North Korea & Kim Jong Un News

Heritage Foundation expert Bruce Klinger wrote this week on North Korea: North Korea announced Wednesday that it has conducted a successful H-bomb nuclear test of a miniaturized warhead. Prior to the announcement, sensors had detected a 5.1-magnitude seismic event at the same approximate location of North Korea's 2013 nuclear test. Nuclear experts are continuing to analyze…

North Korea announced Wednesday that it has conducted a successful H-bomb nuclear test of a miniaturized warhead. Prior to the announcement, sensors had detected a 5.1-magnitude seismic event at the same approximate location of North Korea's 2013 nuclear test. Nuclear experts are continuing to analyze the data, but preliminary assessments are that North Korea did…

Twin events over the weekend dashed tremulous predictions that North Korea was seeking to improve strained relations with South Korea and China. Pyongyang’s decisions to engage in senior-level talks with South Korea, and send Kim Jong-un’s hand-picked Moranbong band to Beijing, presaged (it was hoped) the regime’s intent to substitute parley for its typical pugnacity….

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un asserted that his country has built a hydrogen nuclear bomb to “defend its sovereignty and the dignity of the nation.” If true, it would mark a significant and startling escalation in the regime’s ability to threaten the United States in its allies. While North Korea has developed an arsenal of…

For the second day in a row, Pyongyang raised the ante on rhetoric suggesting it might conduct a prohibited nuclear or missile test in violation of numerous United Nations resolutions. North Korea may conduct either test to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Korea Workers Party on October 10. While satellite imagery previously…

Of the myriad of mind-blowing flaws contained in the Iran nuclear deal—a subject that has dominated the foreign policy debate across the country this summer—there’s one angle that hasn’t gotten enough attention. It’s the possibility that Iran could outsource its nuclear program. In other words, Tehran could play along with the P5+1 (China, France, Germany,…

For decades, the U.S. and other nations have engaged in negotiations to achieve North Korean denuclearization. Pyongyang signed several agreements promising never to build nuclear weapons and then several more pledging to give up the weapons it agreed to not build in the first place. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un now rejects dialogue with the…

Not that there was any doubt, but North Korea publicly rejected any interest in following Iran into denuclearization negotiations with the U.S. The North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared that Pyongyang “is not interested at all in the dialogue to discuss the issue of making it freeze or dismantle its nukes unilaterally first [since…

While the White House winds up its deal on the future of Iran’s nuclear program, angst abounds in U.S. national security circles. Contributing to the anxiety over how the Tehran regime will act in the future is knowledge of how the Pyongyang regime has acted in the past. For years, the North Korean government dabbled…

In the past Pyongyang blamed its poor crop yield on alternating claims of cataclysmic floods and droughts that left South Korea unaffected. The reality was that North Korea’s disastrous economic system was to blame, combined with the country’s mountainous geography which is not conducive to agricultural self-sufficiency. Historically, the southern portion of the Korean Peninsula…