Kim Jong Un just took out a major nuclear insurance policy to protect his safety. A doomsday auto-launch in the event he is “incapacitated in an attack.” It has a hair-trigger too. Nuclear retaliation will launch “automatically and immediately.” At least he warned us before someone sent in a hit team. That could have been messy.
Kim isn’t taking chances
The days of peaceful negotiations over cheeseburgers Between Kim and Donald Trump are over. Since then, the entire geopolitical world has changed. Xi Jinping is angry enough with Joe Biden to go ahead and re-unify Taiwan. At the same time, relations between Beijing and the Kremlin have been thawing. Clearly the balance of power has shifted in the region and the wind of change is blowing right in America’s face.
The “Hermit Kingdom” of North Korea doesn’t have formal relations with anyone but they get along with China pretty good. They make a few deals with Russia once in a while, too.
The North Korean’s are getting suspicious that Mark Milley and the U.S. Joint Chiefs are about to do something sneaky, so Kim decided to make himself a toxic target.
North Korea has passed a law allowing it to carry out a preventive nuclear strike and declaring its status as a nuclear-armed state 'irreversible' https://t.co/GCq2AWhhXe pic.twitter.com/faFntp6fe5
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) September 9, 2022
If Uncle Sam tries to get sneaky and assassinate him, the retaliation button has already been pressed. They made the announcement Friday, September 9, that they have a new law “codifying for the first time that the leader has delegated his strike authority under that severe condition.”
The parliament will rubber-stamp anything Kim puts in front of them and the change they just approved “also allows for preemptive nuclear strikes.”
Their fearless leader is warning the world that if his radar picks up an incoming attack, the nukes will fly before anyone has a chance to even get close. The button is on automatic “if North Korea judges that foreign weapons will soon streak toward its strategic targets or state leadership.”
Announcement is the important part
Just announcing that the doomsday weapon is armed and ready was the most crucial part of the whole setup. That’s the part that went wrong in the Kubrick classic Dr. Strangelove. In the flick, the Russians had a similar set up but hadn’t made the announcement yet.
The big reveal was scheduled for a few days AFTER the accidental crisis event that triggered it. Also by design, there was no way to disarm it. The movie didn’t have a happy ending because the doomsday weapon went off automatically as it had been designed to do. Everyone better hope that Kim stays healthy and happy for a long, long time to come.
Kim also issued a formal proclamation that he’s not about to stop playing with his rockets. “The measure comes as the dictator vowed to never part with the nuclear and missiles program it took his country decades to build, making them more and more dangerous by the year,” Politico writes.
North Korea will “never give up nuclear weapons and there is absolutely no denuclearization, and no negotiation and no bargaining chip to trade in the process,” Kim declared.
As Politico points out, “the law says Kim’s bombs can fly in the event of any weapons of mass destruction attack and/or a non-nuclear strike on state leadership, command of nuclear forces or ‘important strategic objects‘ that is underway or ‘judged to be on the horizon.‘” That leaves it pretty wide open.
“This raises serious questions about the North’s ability to get accurate intelligence and what the threshold of evidence will be to make those judgment calls,” explains a senior fellow and director of the 38 North program. They add that Kim is responding “to comments made by South Korean President Yoon Suk-Yeol, who previously suggested that a preemptive strike on the ‘kill chain‘ in North Korea is necessary as Pyongyang prepares an attack. Indeed, Kim has now let the world know the red button may still get pushed even if he’s dead.“
