SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea’s test-firing of its latest intercontinental ballistic missile early Monday captured headlines across Asia.
Predictably, the launch ignited indignant protests from Seoul, Tokyo and Washington.
As ever, questions are being asked over whether the launch sent a political message — it came a day after the U.S. nuclear-capable cruise missile submarine the USS Missouri arrived in South Korea — or whether the intent was an upgrading of Pyongyang’s weapons engineering skills.
Meanwhile, experts pore over the huge missile’s trajectory, range and likely fuel source. However, it is not a new capability.
North Korea has been ICBM-capable since 2017. In 2023 alone, Pyongyang carried out four previous launches of the missile class, including solid-fuel launches in April and July. It has also conducted multiple tests of different missiles, including shorter-range ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and multiple launch rocket artillery systems.
But the dense smoke clouds lingering after these spectacular events obscure an overlooked fact.
Despite his defiance of the international community, his endless weapons of mass destruction tests, his regime’s bellicose rhetoric and its woeful human rights record, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has not killed a single South Korean.
That makes him very different from his immediate predecessors in the job — his father and grandfather. His continual thumbing of a very well-worn weapons test playbook, while declining to shed blood, raises a question: Is Mr. Kim reluctant to get his hands dirty?
Bloody history
Mr. Kim is the third-generation Kim to rule in Pyongyang, following the death of his father, Kim Jong-il, in 2011.
The latter’s reign, which started in 1994, encompassed the sinking of a South Korea corvette, taking 46 lives, and the shelling of a frontline island, killing four. He is also believed to have overseen deadly operations during his own father’s term in office.
His father, Kim Il Sung, ignited the 1950-53 Korean War — a cataclysm that killed between two and four million. Thereafter, he unleashed multiple deadly attacks thereafter: border clashes, commando raids, a bloody hit on the South Korean Cabinet, even the bombing of a civilian airliner.
Mr. Kim the grandson looks far more cautious by comparison. Though two South Korean soldiers were maimed in a landmine ambush in the DMZ in 2015, not a single South Korean has died at North Korean hands during his 12 years in power.
For sure, he possesses deadlier assets than his predecessors. North Korea conducted its first underground test of an atomic device 2006, marrying that capability to an ICBM capable of striking the mainland U.S. in 2017.
“In order to send a deterrence message he does not need to engage in low-level skirmishing and the active use of violence to cow adversaries,” said Mason Richey, an international relations professor at Seoul’s Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. “Now North Korea has a different set of capabilities — maybe it just does not need to engage in that behavior any more.”
A nuclear arsenal generates a different level of deterrence, but also generates different levels of risk.
“I think any leader, all things being equal, would prefer to take risk off the table if they can,” Mr. Richey said. “The more you have a nuclear arsenal, the more careful you have to be that conventional provocations do not turn into escalations.”
One expert who has met Mr. Kim agrees, but said he also fears a situation when the status quo is fractured by unforeseen circumstances.
“[Boxer] Mike Tyson said he had a plan until he was hit — but that when he was hit, the plan was gone,” said Moon Chung-in, a leading South Korean thinker on unification matters who joined all the South Korean presidential delegations that visited North Korea. “I don’t think there will be a war by plan like in 1950: When Kim tests ICBMs or nuclear weapons, he does not kill innocent civilians, but if war starts, there will be enormous collateral damage.”
Mr. Kim has been reluctant to spark direct clashes on the DMZ or on the ill-defined maritime frontiers flanking the peninsula. Yet Mr. Moon fears an accidental clash that could spiral into something far worse.
“We can assume that [the Kims] are rational actors who minimize risk and maximize benefits,” he said. “But once you are hit, you lose your reason.”
More open but still ruthless
Mr. Kim as a boy spent time in the West, studying at a Swiss school. He has also adopted a more upbeat, open public persona than his father, and unlike his grandfather, has summited with South Korean and U.S. presidents.
None of this makes him warm and cuddly.
“We’ve seen him put the screws on dissenters in his regime and he has not wound down the gulag system,” said Mr. Richey. “I don’t think he is more genteel, or that North Korea has mellowed.”
His privileges, his power and his relentless expansion of a nuclear armory may make him the most dangerous Kim of all.
“He is a natural-born ruthless personality type, close to a psychopath – a person who cannot relate to the sufferings of other people,” said Chun In-bum, an ex-general who formerly led South Korea’s crack Special Warfare Command. “He has not killed South Koreans directly but has killed his own uncle, and God knows how many others. This is not a man who is risk-averse about taking a life.”
In 2013, Mr. Kim ordered the execution of his uncle, long-time senior regime official Jang Son-thaek. Experts believe Mr. Jang’s relations with power brokers in Beijing, personal empire-building within North Korea and possibly disrespect of his nephew led to his end.
In 2017, Mr. Kim’s exiled half-brother, Kim Jong-nam, was assassinated, poisoned with nerve agent in Kuala Lumpur international airport. Some believe Kim Jong-nam was meeting U.S. officials or plotting to defect to the West.
All this, Mr. Chun says, makes Pyongyang’s leader truly fearsome.
“He is smart, patient and confident enough that he is not rushing into things,” he said. “Once ready, he will present us with a great challenge that will be very difficult to stand up to.”
Fear may be a factor in Mr. Kim’s behavior: Washington has warned Pyongyang that it will be annihilated if it ever uses its nuclear arms.
But Mr. Chun worries about the credibility of the current leadership in Washington.
“We have become soft and I often ask myself: ‘Where are the [Curtis] LeMays of the 21st century?’” he said, citing the late U.S. Air Force bomber general noted for his ruthlessness. “That is the only kind of person these monsters really fear.”
