Cue the Don Adams, Max Smart voice: “The old ‘frog in the boiling water” trick, eh?”

That was my reaction (inspired by the American comedy television series) upon reading Aidan Foster Carter’s recent analysis of North Korean behavior and his alarming conclusions about the year ahead. Pyongyang’s antics weren’t secret: They made headlines throughout 2022. Apparently, though, familiarity does breed some form of contempt — or at least a certain numbness.

Carter, one of the most astute — and amusing — analysts on the politics of the Korean Peninsula, warns that 2023 will be an anxious year, “bleaker than most,” with a very real risk of conflict, either the result of deliberate acts or miscalculation. Even more alarming is that every expert I surveyed, hoping for some reassurance, instead echoed his grim conclusions.

Carter, an honorary research fellow at Leeds University, has been a Korea watcher for over half a century. Among his many outlets is Comparative Connections, the triennial (that’s three times a year) journal on Indo-Pacific relations that I write for and edit: His is the North-South Korea chapter.

In the most recent issue, which was released this week, he cataloged a long and expanding list of North Korean provocations. In 2022, North Korea fired more than 90 cruise and ballistic missiles, more than any other year on record. For comparison, it conducted four missile tests in 2020. On just one day last year, Nov. 2, it launched 27 ballistic and surface-to-air missiles, three and half times the number of missile tests in all of 2021. Last year, it also fired nearly 1,000 artillery shells toward the maritime buffer zone that divides the two countries’ offshore waters.

In September, North Korea adopted legislation that created a new doctrine, effectively threatening pre-emptive strikes against its neighbors. In November, Pyongyang ended its self-imposed moratorium on intercontinental missile tests, in effect since 2018, with the launch of the Hwasong-17, a liquid-fuel missile thought capable of hitting any target in the United States. The following month, it tested a solid-fuel rocket engine that would make its missiles more mobile and quicker to launch (both because they can be fueled in advance).

A report released earlier this month from the Korean Institute of Defense Analysis (KIDA), a think tank associated with South Korea’s Ministry of Defense, claims that the North has as many as 80 or 90 nuclear weapons and wants to have a stockpile of 300, which would make it the world’s fourth largest nuclear power, trailing only the U.S., Russia and China. Last year, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimated North Korea had 20 assembled nuclear weapons and enough fissile material to make up to 55.

That study assumes ominous proportions following the release in January of remarks by supreme leader Kim Jong Un in early December to the Workers Party of Korea. In the remarks, he called for “an exponential increase” in the North’s nuclear weapons and ordered the mass production of lower-yield tactical nuclear weapons, which are essentially for battlefield use. Kim said he wants a new ICBM “whose main mission is a quick nuclear counterstrike,” ostensibly to target the U.S., which would be used in conjunction with those tactical weapons.

Nor is that the end of the provocations. The North has branched out, dispatching on Dec. 26 five drones into the South that flew over the country for five hours. One of which — it was confessed a couple of weeks later after initial denials — penetrated a 3.7-km-radius no-fly zone that surrounds the presidential office in Seoul. The South reportedly retaliated by sending its own drones into the North and threatened to send them “deep into North Korea in accordance with the principle of proportionality ... as far as Pyongyang and the launch station at Tongchang-ri (a major rocket launch site).”

I remember reading about each of those incidents. I also mentally filed each away in the “nothing new here” category. Insert here the “frog in boiling water” meme.

Ralph Cossa, my former boss at Pacific Forum who, as a military intelligence analyst and a think tank observer, has probably spent more time than is healthy talking with North Koreans and thinking about their country, warned that “we are paying insufficient attention to North Korea and there is a good chance things are going to get worse this year, even if not kinetic.”

That doesn’t mean that the deterrent has weakened. The U.S. along with its ally South Korea and other regional allies and partners can defend the South. North Korea’s new capabilities, including its expanding nuclear arsenal, don’t alter the fundamentals of peninsular defense and deterrence.

But the possibility of misunderstanding, miscalculation or missteps is real. The pattern of provocations could encourage Pyongyang to think it has deterred Seoul or Washington. Evans Revere, a former State Department official who worked on Korean Peninsula issues for much of his career and continues to think about them, pointed to the drone flights as proof, calling them “a remarkably bold move and the North got away with it. ... We should expect Pyongyang to again test the South's defenses in the days to come.”

Both Cossa and Revere argued that its nuclear arsenal fueled the North’s penchant for risk taking. Revere noted Pyongyang's belief that its possession of nukes gives it “cover” to engage in conventional military adventurism, adding that “Kim Jong Un may now believe he can intensify military pressure on the South without fear of retaliation.”

Cossa warned that Kim appears to have learned that “Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling” effectively kept the West from more active intervention in Ukraine and “it is not a great leap of logic to assume that the North’s powerful nuclear sword will be sufficient to keep the U.S./UNC (United Nations Command) at bay if they grab or shoot up an island or attack a ROK ship or demilitarized zone outpost.” Adventurism will be encouraged by a belief that China and/or Russia would provide diplomatic cover if Pyongyang did so.

The North is likely also motivated by frustration triggered by its inability to move Washington and Seoul away from hard-line positions, to be more accommodating and to make dealing with Pyongyang a priority — and on its terms. Provocations remind them, and the world, that North Korea is an important regional actor and ignoring or downplaying it has very real consequences.

North Korea isn’t the only government experiencing frustration; South Korea is too and the government there is making its displeasure increasingly plain. The tit-for-tat drone dispatch was intended to be reciprocal but it looked reflexive rather than reasoned.

The North’s steady acquisition of nuclear capabilities alarms and angers the South because of the impact it has on security and regional status. During a policy briefing last week, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol said for the first time that his country may build its own nuclear weapons or ask the U.S. to redeploy them on the Korean Peninsula. Building them “won’t take a long time for us ... given our scientific and technological capabilities.” (He added, though, that his preference was to strengthen the alliance with the U.S.) This followed an announcement that the allies were considering the possibility of holding joint nuclear exercises; if you think Pyongyang was angered by the resumption of U.S.-South Korea military exercises, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Revere writes that Yoon “seems determined to make North Korea pay a price for its adventurism. Indeed, he seems to believe the ROK has no choice but to do so in order to prevent Pyongyang from raising the stakes with future military challenges.”

Gibum Kim, an analyst at KIDA, agreed, distinguishing Yoon’s readiness to take a harder line than his predecessor, the government of progressive President Moon Jae-in. “The dynamic is different,” he explained in an email. While the government in Seoul remains open to engagement, “it’s emphasizing robust defense readiness and deterrence against the DPRK’s increasing nuclear and missile threat.”

Like Revere and Cossa, Kim worries that North Korea will continue to test Yoon’s resolve, as well as that of the alliance. He also agrees that “military aggression doesn’t feel like a distant possibility,” after the Ukraine invasion.

Fortunately, we’ve all been forced to acknowledge that grim reality. As long as we aren’t numbed by or habituated to the steady erosion of peace and deterrence on the Korean Peninsula, we can prepare and respond to Pyongyang’s provocations. That should reduce the prospect of a North Korean miscalculation, an important first step to maintain peace on the peninsula.

Brad Glosserman is deputy director of and visiting professor at the Center for Rule-Making Strategies at Tama University as well as senior adviser (nonresident) at Pacific Forum. He is the author of "Peak Japan: The End of Great Ambitions" (Georgetown University Press, 2019).