Kim Jong-un's latest gestures are certainly no stranger to these new statements.
The United States has announced that it is preparing "a coordinated and concrete response (
with South Korea
) to a series of scenarios, including the use of nuclear weapons by North Korea", said a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council on Tuesday.
"The United States is totally committed to our alliance with South Korea and provides it with an extensive deterrent capability, drawing on the full range of the American defense arsenal," he said.
However, he clarified that these preparations would not include “joint nuclear exercises”, since South Korea does not have atomic weapons.
These statements come as Kim Jong-un's regime tested three ballistic missiles east of the Korean peninsula last Saturday, which crashed in the Sea of Japan.
Five days earlier, North Korean drones had flown over South Korean airspace, with one even reaching north of Seoul, the capital.
Exercises with airs of provocations which come to close a record year with more than 70 missile firings carried out by the North, including 23 in a single day.
The most closed country in the world also tested an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in March for the first time in five years, before repeating the test in November.
And the North Korean dictator intends to keep up the pace since he asked on Sunday for an "exponential increase in the nuclear arsenal" of his country.
At the end of a major meeting in Pyongyang, the ruling Workers' Party also announced that the country would "develop a new ICBM missile system whose main mission will be a rapid nuclear counterattack", the agency reported on Sunday. official KCNA.
North Korean leaders say a credible nuclear deterrent is essential to the survival of their country, which says it is under constant threat of aggression from the United States.
Reassure Seoul
These new American statements are also intended to appease South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol who has claimed that the American "nuclear umbrella" and its "extended deterrence" are no longer enough to reassure the South Koreans.
"Nuclear weapons belong to the United States, but preparation, information sharing, exercises and training must be done jointly by South Korea and the United States," he said.
A senior US official acknowledged that "North Korea's actions and statements were a cause for growing concern".
He also explained that the United States and South Korea were "working together to strengthen" the deterrent system, which will particularly involve "simulations" on the response to a nuclear strike from North Korea.
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The Pentagon, for its part, establishes very clearly in its "nuclear posture", the document which sets the rules for the use of atomic weapons, that "any nuclear attack by North Korea against the United States or its allies and partners would be unacceptable and would result in the end of the regime".
“There is no hypothesis in which the Kim regime could survive the use of nuclear weapons,” he adds.
Seoul and Washington lend Pyongyang the intention of carrying out a new nuclear test soon, which would be the seventh in its history and the first since 2017.