Is Kim Jong Un preparing North Korea for war?

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un may be taking the Korean Peninsula closer to armed conflict, analysts have warned, amid intensifying nuclear threats and tests.

SEOUL, South Korea — Is Kim Jong Un about to take North Korea to war?

For decades, the reclusive state has said its goal is to peacefully reunify with its “fellow countrymen” in South Korea. Now Kim has formally cast that goal aside, framing his neighbors as the enemy while intensifying his nuclear threats and tests — and raising alarm about whether, with the world focused on wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, he may be poised to start yet another conflict.

While threats and angry rhetoric are nothing new from North Korea, which was led by Kim’s grandfather and father before him, two renowned American analysts say Kim’s latest moves go beyond the “typical bluster” and suggest he could be preparing for an attack on South Korea, a U.S. treaty ally. 

“We believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war,” former State Department official Robert L. Carlin and nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker wrote this month in a widely talked-about essay on the U.S.-based website 38 North.

That analysis and Kim's continued actions have set off an intense debate about just how worried the world should be.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/kim-jong-un-north-korea-war-rcna134046

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