SEOUL: North Korea has changed its constitution so its military is required to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike if Kim Jong-un is assassinated by a foreign adversary.
The change was made after Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, and many of his closest advisers were martyred in strikes at the start of the joint US-Israeli attacks against the regime in Tehran.
The revision was adopted at the first session of the 15th Supreme People’s Assembly, which opened on March 22 in Pyongyang. It was made public on Thursday in a briefing to senior members of the South Korean government by its National Intelligence Service (NIS).According to the NIS briefing, Kim has command of the North’s nuclear forces, but the changes codify procedures for retaliatory attacks in the event that he is incapacitated or killed.
The revised Article 3 of the nuclear policy law states: “If the command-and-control system over the state’s nuclear forces is placed in danger by hostile forces’ attacks ... a nuclear strike shall be launched automatically and immediately.”Prof Andrei Lankov, a Russian-born professor of history and international relations at Kookmin University in Seoul, said: “This may have been policy before, but it has added emphasis now it has been enshrined in the constitution.“Iran was the wake-up call. North Korea saw the remarkable efficiency of the US-Israeli decapitation attacks, which immediately eliminated the greater part of the Iranian leadership, and they must now be terrified.”
