Sangkyu Lee, Suon Choi, Adam Mount, and Toby Dalton | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
How can the United States and South Korea best deter North Korea from carrying out a nuclear attack? In response to continued development of North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities, officials in Washington and Seoul have invested considerable effort to ensure that the ROK-U.S. alliance has a unified approach. Nevertheless, differences in their views persist, particularly over how best to communicate alliance deterrence posture…To help government officials and experts understand what is behind these differences in views, we provide South Korean and American perspective on three questions about what actions and statements will best deter North Korea and why.
JESSE JOHNSON | Japan Times
North Korea on Thursday said for the first time that it successfully tested a new multiple-warhead missile capability, state-run media said, a claim dismissed by the South Korean military as a “deception.” Pyongyang “successfully conducted the separation and guidance control test of individual mobile warheads” on Wednesday, the official Korean Central News Agency reported, adding that “the separated mobile warheads were guided correctly” to three target coordinates.
David E. Sanger and Farnaz Fassihi | The New York Times
As Iranians prepare to go to the polls on Friday to elect a successor to President Ebrahim Raisi, who was killed in a helicopter crash last month along with the foreign minister, top Iranian officials have dropped the ritual assurances that Iran has only peaceful uses in mind for its nuclear program. One official close to Iran’s supreme leader recently declared that if Iran faces an existential threat, it would “reconsider its nuclear doctrine.”
Reuters
A senior Russian diplomat, in an interview published on Thursday, urged the United States to pay attention to discussions under way on possibly altering Moscow's nuclear doctrine to suit changed conditions in international relations…Ryabkov restated Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin's assertions of recent weeks that Russia's nuclear doctrine, setting down when such weapons could be used, was being reassessed. He told Izvestia that the doctrine was drafted "in a different era and in different circumstances" and that he hoped the discussions now "are being taken seriously by our opponents". "I am not anticipating the outcome, but I urge our adversaries to think about what the president is saying," he said.
Reuters
Ukrainian shelling destroyed a radiation control post in Velyka Znamyanka in the Zaporizhzhia region, Russia's management of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine said on Wednesday. "(Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant) specialists carried out a number of compensatory measures to control the radiation situation in the area," the management said on the Telegram messaging app. Radiation levels, the management added, do not exceed safe levels.
The Economist
In early 2021 Micross Components, a designer of highly specialised circuitry in Melville, New York, received an intriguing request. An American aerospace giant wanted components that could protect a military system’s electronics from the radiation generated by a nuclear detonation…That talk was motivated by a Russian satellite called Cosmos-2553, which is thought to be secretly testing the necessary electronics some 2,000km above Earth’s surface. A nuclear detonation there would probably be too high to wreak any meaningful direct damage on the surface of Earth. But it could cause what Lieutenant-Colonel James McCue, an outgoing official with America’s Defence Threat Reduction Agency, calls a “satellite Armageddon”.