kim leverages nuclear shield as trump weighs new iran strikes

As President Donald Trump considers ordering a second wave of strikes on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure in less than a year, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is watching from a position of renewed strategic confidence. The large-scale U.S. military deployment to the Middle East, the biggest in more than two decades, has reinforced Pyongyang’s conviction that its nuclear arsenal is the ultimate safeguard against regime change. Officials and experts say the U.S. focus on Iran, where Washington believes its bunker-buster bombs and cruise missiles can still credibly threaten the country’s nuclear program, stands in sharp contrast to the absence of a viable military option to eliminate North Korea’s more advanced and heavily protected arsenal.

Last June, in an operation code-named “Midnight Hammer,” six U.S. B-2 stealth bombers dropped bunker-buster munitions on Iran’s underground Fordo enrichment plant while Navy submarines launched cruise missiles at targets in Natanz and Isfahan. Trump proclaimed that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated,” even as intelligence assessments later raised doubts about the extent of the damage. Now, with two carrier strike groups and hundreds of combat aircraft positioned within range of Iranian territory, the administration is preparing contingency plans for additional attacks as early as this weekend, though Trump has not yet issued a final order. For Kim, the signals are unambiguous: Washington is prepared to hit non-nuclear adversaries hard, but remains deterred from attempting a similar operation against a state that can retaliate with nuclear weapons.

Analysts say Pyongyang interprets the strikes on Iran as validation of its decades-long pursuit of a nuclear deterrent. Lim Eul-chul, a professor of North Korean studies at Kyungnam University, argues that North Korea is likely to accelerate efforts to strengthen its capacity for preemptive nuclear and missile strikes in response to what it sees as U.S. preemption in the Middle East. Victor Cha, who heads the geopolitics and foreign policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, notes that the Iran operation reinforces two core conclusions in Pyongyang: that Washington lacks a credible conventional strike option to neutralize North Korea’s nuclear program, and that U.S. attacks on non-nuclear states only harden Kim’s determination to retain and expand his arsenal. With an estimated stockpile of around 50 operational warheads and fissile material for dozens more, North Korea sits beyond the reach of the type of raid carried out against Iran.

The comparison with countries that abandoned or never completed their nuclear efforts is stark. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was overthrown in 2003 despite not possessing nuclear weapons at the time of the U.S.-led invasion. Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi agreed to dismantle his nuclear program in 2003, only to be deposed in a NATO-backed intervention eight years later. Iran, which has not demonstrated a working nuclear device, saw key facilities struck while it was still engaged in diplomacy over its nuclear activities. For many in Pyongyang, these cases reinforce a single lesson: non-nuclear regimes are vulnerable, while nuclear-armed states enjoy a de facto shield against full-scale intervention.

Kim underscored that perception of strength as he opened the Ninth Congress of the Workers’ Party in Pyongyang on Thursday, hailing what he described as an “irreversible” consolidation of North Korea’s status since the previous congress in 2021. Addressing thousands of party delegates, he declared that the country had overcome its “worst difficulties” and entered a phase of renewed “hope and confidence in the future,” framing the congress as a milestone in both economic recovery and geopolitical elevation. Although his opening speech emphasized domestic development, Kim had already signaled in January that the gathering would outline “next-stage plans” to further upgrade the country’s nuclear deterrent, suggesting that nuclear forces remain central to his long-term state strategy.

In the lead-up to the congress, state media showcased 50 new 600-millimeter multiple rocket launchers designed to carry nuclear warheads, alongside tests of hypersonic missiles, long-range cruise missiles and advanced air defense systems. Presenting the new launcher as a quasi-divine instrument of retribution, Kim declared that “when this weapon is employed, no force would be able to anticipate divine protection,” a phrase clearly intended to amplify the psychological impact of North Korea’s evolving nuclear strike capability. Military experts say such systems are meant to complicate U.S. and allied planning by diversifying delivery platforms and saturating missile defenses, thereby increasing the credibility of Pyongyang’s threat to inflict severe damage on U.S. bases and allied cities in the region.

Washington’s own strategic documents reflect how sharply expectations have shifted. The latest National Security Strategy and the 2026 National Defense Strategy no longer include the explicit goal of North Korean denuclearization, breaking with more than two decades of U.S. policy language that treated complete, verifiable and irreversible disarmament as the central objective. Analysts at the Quincy Institute describe this omission as a “strategic deprioritization,” arguing that the Trump administration is now forced to spread military and diplomatic resources across concurrent crises in the Middle East, Venezuela and other theaters. In practice, this means that managing and containing a nuclear-armed North Korea has become a more realistic aim than disarming it.

Kim has also benefited from a shifting geopolitical environment. A comprehensive strategic partnership with Russia, formalized in a mutual defense pact in June 2024, has deepened military and economic ties between Pyongyang and Moscow at a time when both countries face extensive Western sanctions. China, meanwhile, remains committed to avoiding instability on the Korean Peninsula, favoring calibrated pressure and limited enforcement of sanctions over actions that could trigger a collapse or conflict on its border. Supported by these two permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, Kim faces little coordinated external pressure strong enough to compel unilateral nuclear concessions.

For many regional specialists, the cumulative effect is that denuclearization has effectively vanished from the realistic negotiating agenda. Hong Min, a senior researcher at the Korea Institute for National Unification, notes that “denuclearization appears to be off the table for good” under current conditions, with Pyongyang unwilling to trade away what it views as the foundation of regime survival. Instead, some experts argue that future talks, if they occur, are more likely to revolve around arms control arrangements aimed at capping or managing North Korea’s nuclear and missile forces. Even that outcome, they say, would require Washington and its allies to accept North Korea as a nuclear-armed state in practice, if not in formal legal terms, a step successive U.S. administrations have so far resisted.