In practical terms, there’s a disconnect between North Korea’s dire internal economic situation and this ambitious nuclear and military modernisation agenda.

Ankit Panda

Liquid fuel missile engines exploding do not give off radiation, and we know that the Russians are working on some kind of nuclear propulsion for a cruise missile.

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We can clearly see that it is a massive submarine - much larger than the existing one that's been well known since 2014.

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This, to my eye, is the submarine that the U.S. intelligence community has been calling the Sinpo-C, a successor to North Korea's only known ballistic missile submarine.

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There are some interesting, perhaps unintended consequences for the Western response against Russia in particular, which is that a Russia that has been completely isolated from the global economy and put under tremendous sanctions pressure. I think it has very few incentives to enforce sanctions against North Korea.

A robust Saudi missile program would introduce new challenges to constraining other missile programs in the region. To take just one example, Iran's missiles, which are a major concern to the U.S., would be more difficult to constrain in the future without parallel constraints on a growing Saudi program.

The diversification we're seeing in North Korea is puzzling considering the constrained resources in the country, what we see is really more than 10, around 15, potential nuclear delivery systems under development. It's really remarkable.

This would be the first cruise missile in North Korea to be explicitly designated a ‘strategic’ role.

These parades aren't just for the outside world, of course.

Kim continues to show the world that despite North Korea's economic difficulties over the last year, the focus on sustaining nuclear forces and modernizing conventional weaponry has not shifted.

We know from experience that as much as presidents would like to downgrade the status of the Middle East and transatlantic issues in favor of Asia, doing so is far from straightforward. The growing urgency of Asia, however, is here to stay.

Regardless of who wins the presidency, only about half of Americans are likely to support the President, and many of the other half will be perpetually motivated to oppose the President. That leaves a thin margin of error in any crisis, which may induce extreme caution for fear of losing political support and exposing the administration to damaging political criticisms.

There is an element of projecting a business-as-usual image amid the COVID-19 situation, but I think it's not overriding, these tests do allow Kim Jong Un to show that he's sticking to the hard-line policy he laid out in December 2019.

Adding more nuclear warheads to a single missile can better assure them of an ability to penetrate American missile defense and, if they're worried that their warheads might have reliability issues, more warheads increases the odds that one warhead will successfully detonate.

They might work toward developing better liquid-propellant engines or revisit older engines that they've had trouble with in the past.

Every missile they've flight-tested in 2019 to date has used a solid rocket motor and they're clearly becoming more adept at casting these motors in different diameters, there are challenges associated with moving to ICBM-sized SRMs, but perhaps North Korea will demonstrate a breakthrough on that front.

The point seems to be to remind the United States that North Korea still has space to qualitatively advance North Korea program.