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NK News
NK News is a North Korea specialist news and information resource head-quartered in Delaware, U.S.A.
by Stephan Haggard and Luke Herman
The recent round of rhetorical escalation between North Korea, South Korea and the U.S. crested just as two political gatherings were convening: a plenum of the Workers’ Party Central Committee and the Supreme People’s Assembly (SPA), the country’s legislature. Both are top-down bodies that are used not to deliberate, but to propagate: to hand out the script. The meetings generated both interesting leadership moves and some new programmatic statements. The SPA edicts represent a full-throated statement of the intention to square the circle: to become a responsible nuclear power and aggressively pursuing a “space”—read “missile”—program while also undertaking economic reconstruction.