SEOUL – After another weekslong absence from public view, North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, convened the country’s top military governing body, outlining “new policies for further increasing” its nuclear capabilities and promoting top weapons officials, the North’s state-run media said Sunday.
Kim’s attendance at the meeting was his first public activity reported by North Korean media in three weeks. A weekslong absence from public view last month prompted rumors that he might have health problems, and his absence again this month sparked similar rumors.
During the meeting of the Central Military Commission of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea, Kim was said to have promoted Ri Pyong Chol to vice chairman of the commission. Ri has been in charge of building nuclear weapons and their delivery missiles.
Kim also promoted nearly 70 general officers, elevating Pak Jong Chon, a career military commander specializing in artillery and missile forces, to vice marshal, only a year after he was made a four-star general and chief of the North Korean army’s general staff.
Both Ri and Pak were among North Korean officials whose roles appeared to expand under Kim’s government as he refocused on expanding his country’s nuclear and missile capabilities following the collapse of his diplomacy with President Donald Trump.
“Set forth at the meeting were new policies for further increasing the nuclear war deterrence of the country and putting the strategic armed forces on a high-alert operation,” the North’s official Korean Central News Agency reported Sunday.
The news agency did not say when the meeting took place, nor did it clarify what Kim’s new policies on nuclear weapons might be.
Since taking over North Korea in 2011, Kim has accelerated his country’s nuclear weapons and missile programs. Kim then switched to diplomacy, meeting Trump twice, but their meetings failed to reach an agreement on how to eliminate North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs or when to ease U.N. sanctions against the North. In May last year, North Korea broke an 18-month hiatus in weapons tests, conducting 18 tests of mostly short-range ballistic missiles and rockets since then.
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