The annual late winter-early spring hostile rhetoric between North and South Korea is well under way, with North Korea’s state media hyping a report that Leader Kim Jong Un has ordered the country’s military into “preemptive attack” mode and is ordering them to ready the use of nuclear weapons at any time.
While the comments are getting a lot of media attention, they’re just the run-of-the-mill posturing that happens this time every year, around the major US-South Korea military drills, and ultimately calms down when the North Korean military is redeployed to plant crops in the spring.
Though North Korea has conducted a handful of underground atomic detonations, they are not believed to have miniaturized the weapons into any sort of usable form.
North Korea’s claims of capability to launch nuclear attacks not just regionally but globally are generally dismissed as propaganda, though ironically during these brief seasons when the rhetoric picks up they are given more credibility.