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.