North Korea's pugnacious rhetoric and unceasing weapons tests are raising tricky questions over whether it is inclined towards preparing for major provocations or cross-border conflict, amid the protracted absence of dialogue with South Korea and the United States. Some U.S. scholars have stressed the need to take the North's rhetoric more seriously given the shifting security landscape marked by burgeoning cooperation between Pyongyang and Moscow, while others dismissed it as an apparent move to reassert its military presence and promote internal cohesion among other reasons. During an year-end ruling party gathering in December, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called for beefed-up war readiness and preparations for a "great event to suppress South Korea's whole territory in the event of a contingency." Later, Kim called for a constitutional revision to label the South as the "invariable principal enemy." Further aggravating tensions this month, the North launched what it called a solid-fuel intermediate -range ballistic missile tipped with a hypersonic warhead, tested a claimed underwater nuclear weapons system and then fired several cruise missiles. The North's provocative trajectory came amid concerns that its scrapping of a 2018 inter-Korean military tension reduction agreement, coupled with the absence of diplomatic engagement between the two Koreas, could lead to accidental clashes albeit on a limited scale. Robert Carlin, a former North Korea analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, and Siegfried Hecker, a renowned American nuclear scientist, recently said they believe the North Korean leader has decided to "go to war." "The situation on the Korean Peninsula is more dangerous than it has been at any time since early June 1950," they said in a joint contribution to 38 North, a U.S. website devoted to analysis about North Korea. "That may sound overly dramatic, but we believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong-un has made a strategic decision to go to war." They said they do not know whe n or how Kim plans to "pull the trigger," but the danger is already far beyond the "routine warnings" in Washington, Seoul and Tokyo about Pyongyang's "provocations." "In other words, we do not see the war preparation themes in North Korean media appearing since the beginning of last year as typical bluster from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK)," they said, referring to the North by its official name. Such an assessment came against the backdrop of growing worries that Pyongyang could engage in bolder military provocations given that it has apparently been emboldened by its deepening ties with Moscow and traditional partnership with Beijing, all of which observers warned could cause a shift in the regional security landscape. Concerns further deepened as history has shown Pyongyang has a tendency to undertake provocations in the lead-up to major elections in South Korea and the U.S. The South is to hold parliamentary elections in April while the U.S. is set to hold a presidential election i n November. With the North and Russia closing ranks at a fast pace, U.S. officials appear to have started to pay more heed to the North's rhetoric and its evolving threats. "You have to take rhetoric like that seriously from a man in charge of the regime that continues to pursue advanced military capabilities, including nuclear capabilities," John Kirby, the U.S. National Security Council (NSC) coordinator for strategic communications, told a press briefing on Friday. Pranay Vaddi, senior director for arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation at the NSC, also expressed his apprehension about recent security developments related to the North. "What we are seeing between Russia and North Korea is an unprecedented level of cooperation in the military sphere and I say unprecedented very deliberately. We have never seen this before," he said at a forum hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Thursday. "I think the nature of North Korea as a threat in the region could drastically change over the coming decade as a result of this cooperation," he added. Touching on the North's exit from the inter-Korean military tension reduction accord, Vaddi also stressed the need to dial down tensions between the two Koreas. "We need to work assiduously to try to ensure there's a modicum of risk reduction measures that are still in place to prevent any sort of crisis or political disagreement from escalating into a conflict," he said. U.S. officials' renewed attention to the security challenge came amid speculation that the North Korean quandary might have been nudged onto the back burner as Washington is preoccupied with instability in the Middle East and Russia's war in Ukraine. Some observers dismissed the North's hostile rhetoric, noting that a country with plans of waging war could hardly sell its weapons overseas in reference to U.S. revelations that the North provided Russia with several dozen ballistic missiles for use in Ukraine in addition to earlier supplies of weapons equipment and m unitions. "A barking dog does not bite (you)," South Korean Defense Minister Shin Won-sik said in a KBS radio interview last week. "If North Korea really intends to conduct warfare, can it export to Russia millions of artillery shells that are most essential for war execution?." In a show of strength against North Korean threats on Wednesday, Shin repeated the warning that should the North wage war, it would face the "end" of its regime. Bruce Bennett, a senior defense analyst at Rand Corp., said the North Korean leader's recent aggressive remarks may be "bluster likely to deal with internal instability" and "bait the ROK into some actions that will hurt the ROK-U.S. alliance." ROK stands for South Korea's official name, the Republic of Korea. "Unless things are really getting desperate for Kim, he likely won't jump to a big war. But he could well push the peninsula into an escalatory spiral with limited attacks," Bennett told Yonhap News Agency via email. "I think the ROK needs to say that the US/ROK ha ve no interest in attacking the North ... attacks on the North would gain little and likely cost much. Therefore, any North Korean limited attacks would be the result of Kim deciding that he needs something serious to divert internal attention from internal problems," he added. Worries about the North Korean challenge have risen further as the U.N. Security Council, once seen as a bulwark of global peace, has not functioned properly amid disunity among its members, including the two veto-wielding members of China and Russia, the traditional partners of the North. Source: Yonhap News Agency