After the devastatingly precise US-Israeli strikes that killed supreme leader Ali Khamenei and his inner circle, North Korea has reportedly moved to hardwire “immediate” retaliation into law.
The authoritarian regime led by despot Kim Jong-un has hastily revised its nuclear rules to ensure a strike is launched “automatically” if command over the state’s nuclear forces is threatened.
“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,” South Korean intelligence sources said in recent briefings.
While the wording does not explicitly mention Kim’s death, analysts are interpreting it that way because Kim personally sits at the centre of North Korea’s command system.
It was reinforced by a particularly ominous address delivered by North Korea’s ambassador to the United Nations this week.
It was one of Pyongyang’s clearest declarations yet that the regime sees itself as a permanent nuclear state.
“The status of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as a nuclear-armed state will not change based on external rhetorical claims or unilateral desires,” Kim Song said on May 6.
“To make it clear once again, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea will not be bound by the Non-Proliferation Treaty under any circumstances whatsoever.”
The threats are another unwelcome addition to the increasingly delicate world order, which is being tested by wars on multiple fronts and various nations’ posturing.
The famous Doomsday Clock — maintained by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists — sits at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest point to catastrophe in history.
In a January update, The Bulletin warned of collapsing global cooperation amid wars, nuclear threats and accelerating geopolitical instability as the main drivers for the current global powder keg.
The sixty second period of total annihilation in Tehran on February 28th served as a brutal reminder of the volatile game the hermit kingdom is playing. Donald Trump has proven once again to be an unpredictable world leader and multiple hostile regimes are clearly on his bucket list.
“Iran was the wake-up call,” Professor Andrei Lankov said via the UK Telegraph.
While analysts say a similar incursion is highly unlikely, Pyongyang operates under an umbrella of paranoia that a Western attack is near.
The regime spends an estimated 25 per cent of GDP on its military, a whopping fraction compared to the USA’s three per cent.
It is now ramping up the rhetoric among its tightly controlled parliament to ensure Kim’s safety is guaranteed at all costs.
Reports say Israeli intelligence used hacked Tehran surveillance and traffic cameras, along with other intelligence streams, to help track Khamenei before the strike that killed him.
However, that kind of decapitation strike would be far harder in North Korea.
Pyongyang is vastly more sealed off than Tehran and Kim’s movements are famously guarded, including his preference for armoured train travel.
Nevertheless, the constitutional change suggests the regime is planning for the possibility regardless.
The US position on North Korea remains officially centred on deterrence, sanctions enforcement and denuclearisation.
The State Department said in January 2026 that Washington remains committed to “the complete denuclearisation of North Korea” and US-Japan talks in February reaffirmed the same goal.
A US-led military campaign would be incredibly risky, given the fact North Korea has essentially removed itself from the negotiating table.
The dictatorship already has nuclear weapons and is believed to hold dozens of warheads.
Analysts from the South Korean Asan Institute for Policy Studies say the Kim regime has spent decades declaring its nuclear status irreversible, and grows its arsenal by an estimated 110 per year.
The military launched multiple ballistic missiles in April, including five upgraded short-range Hwasong-11 Ra missiles in tests Kim personally oversaw.
Word North Korea wants wiped from history
Amid all the nuclear posturing, North Korea also quietly erased one of the most symbolic ideas in its fractured history from the constitution.
It has symbolically dashed hopes that the nation will never return to the fold.
According to documents revealed at a briefing by South Korea’s Unification Ministry, a clause stating the regime aimed “to realise the unification of the motherland” has disappeared from the country’s revised constitution.
The move is the clearest sign yet that leader Kim is abandoning decades of rhetoric around eventual unity with South Korea – instead cementing the two Koreas as permanent enemies.
The significance of the change runs deep, spitting in the face of decades of optimistic campaigns to repair the bloody history between the two neighbours.
Since the Korean peninsula was split after World War II and devastated by the Korean War in the 1950s, both governments had officially maintained that reunification was the long-term goal.
The North has traditionally portrayed itself as the true government of all Koreans, while Seoul has also enshrined reunification as a national aspiration.
Families separated by war have become enduring symbols of the division, with emotional reunions occasionally taking place during rare diplomatic thaws.
Even at the height of military tensions, the concept of eventual unity survived. Kim appears to be dismantling that idea entirely as the broader global order fractures.
Earlier this year, he labelled the South his country’s “most hostile state”. It was a dramatic shift in tone even by Pyongyang’s standards.
The change comes despite repeated overtures from South Korean President Lee Jae-myung, who has pushed for unconditional talks and said the two Koreas were destined “to make the flowers of peace bloom”.
