On Dec. 17, 2016, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un marked his fifth year in power. The grandson of regime founder Kim Il Sung, the North’s current ruler has accelerated the threat that his nation poses to the United States and its allies.
Pyongyang has been led by a brutal communist dictatorship for more than half a century. A leading human rights violator, North Korea has a history of terrorizing both its neighbors and its own subjects.
Long an implacable American foe, in recent years the country has enhanced its military capabilities to a frightening extent.
According to a Dec. 8, 2016 Associated Press report, an anonymous senior U.S. military official said that North Korea likely now has the ability to mount nuclear warheads on missiles. As the AP noted, “U.S. officials have steadily expanded their assessments of Pyongyang’s nuclear abilities.” And with good reason — the rogue, dynastic regime has conducted two nuclear tests in the last year alone.
The last test, conducted in September 2016, was the Hermit Kingdom’s fifth since 2006, the year it publically revealed itself to be a nuclear power. The number five may carry particular significance, as arms control analyst Jeffrey Lewis pointed out in a Sept. 10, 2016 Atlantic op-ed. “By their fifth test,” Lewis cautioned, the nuclear powers of the United States, the USSR, Britain, France and China had “demonstrated the technologies to reduce the size of first-generation weapons, and were well on their way to building thermonuclear weapons.”
Recent evaluations put the country’s current nuclear stockpile as varying between 10-20 warheads — for now. As the Wall Street Journal reported in April 2015, mid-range estimates believe that North Korea may have as many as 50 nuclear weapons by the year 2020.
What is more, Pyongyang has put considerable effort into advancing the delivery systems for these and other weapons.
Bruce Klinger, a Heritage Foundation research fellow and former CIA deputy division chief for Korea, has noted that in his five years in power, Kim Jong Un has conducted more than twice as many missile tests as his father, Kim Jong Il, did in his 17-year rule.
Indeed, the saying “practice makes perfect” applies to missile technology as much as anything else. As the recent AP report highlighted, “the strings of tests indicate that North Korea may have medium-range missiles capable of striking American military bases in the Pacific in the next couple years, experts say. Some believe Pyongyang may be able to hit the western United States as early as 2020.”
Other intercontinental ballistic missiles, the road-mobile KN-08 and the KN-14, are being developed. Once fully operational, they will be able to hit any point in the continental U.S., according to the head of U.S. Northern Command.
Troubling still, the North has—under the cover of a civilian space program — continued to develop its Taepodong-2 rocket, which an overlooked 1999 National Intelligence Council report warned could, with some effort, deliver a several-pound warhead “anywhere in the United States.”
The North Korean threat extends beyond nukes and rockets, however, as the kingdom has steadily enhanced its capacity for asymmetric warfare.
At his April 2016 Senate confirmation, U.S. Army Gen. Vincent Brooks, the commander of U.S. forces in South Korea, called the North’s cyber capabilities “among the best in the world and among the best organized.”
As Brooks noted in his testimony, many of North Korea’s conventional weapons are old and outdated. By heavily investing in cyber, its backwards, authoritarian government is able to present a cost-effective, but growing danger to the U.S. and its allies.
One defector, a former computer science professor at Pyongyang University, told the BBC that Kim Jong Un employs at least 6,000 hackers — many of them in the country’s elite cyberwarfare unit known as Bureau 121. Believed to operate out of China, Bureau 121 has been responsible for numerous advanced cyberattacks, including a 2015 assault on South Korea’s hydroelectric and nuclear power plants.
Bureau 121 operatives report to the country’s General Bureau of Reconnaissance, a military intelligence agency. According to a 2014 Reuters interview with a defector named Jang Se-Yul, the unit has teams stationed overseas and operating under various guises (“In North Korea, hackers are a handpicked, hampered elite,” Dec. 5).
For more than six decades, North Korea has menaced the West and its allies. In recent years, the threat from Pyongyang has only grown. The United States must prioritize dealing with this challenge. The clock is ticking.
Sean Durns is a Washington D.C.-based foreign affairs analyst. His views are his own. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
