In the three years since the world came closer to nuclear catastrophe than it had in years, North Korea’s place in the American and Japanese political consciousness has dissipated, with the response to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic taking center stage less than four months before the U.S. presidential election.
Although verbal threats of “fire and fury” and flights over or near Japan of missiles thought capable of carrying nuclear bombs as far as the continental U.S. have all but vanished, Pyongyang still retains its ever-growing and improving nuclear arsenal — something the North has gone out of its way to highlight.
On Sunday, North Korean state media said that the Central Military Commission, the body responsible for the development and implementation of the ruling party’s military and defense policies, had a day earlier discussed “further bolstering” the country’s “war deterrent,” an implicit reference to its nuclear weapons.