North Korea has amended its constitution to codify an automatic nuclear response if its enemies attempt to decapitate the government and kill Kim Jong Un with a missile strike or snatch operation, according to South Korean intelligence.

“Assassinating Kim Jong-un in a foreign strike → automatic nuclear retaliation is now law,” according to the reported wording of the policy shift.

As IntelliNews reported, the war in Ukraine will promote nuclear proliferation as one of the lessons of the war is that the Western alliance will not directly attack a country with nuclear weapons. While US forces have had few qualms about flying bombing sorties against Iran, which has yet to develop a bomb, it has shied away from directly engaging with Russia, which does. Indeed, former Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg made it explicit in the first months following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine four years ago: “Our first priority is to prevent WWIII,” he said at the time.

North Korea has invested heavily in developing nuclear weapons and is believed to have some 50 warheads, according to experts. It has also invested into its long-range missile capabilities, a technology it appears to have shared with Iran, which recently unveiled a never-seen-before missile with over 4,000km range in an attack on the US base on Diego Garcia. As IntelliNews has reported, one of the consequences of the war on Iran has been to drive the members of the CRINK alliance (China, Russia, Iran and North Korea) closer together and increase their military cooperation.

South Korea’s intelligence services said the provision effectively establishes regime survival as a nuclear red line. “Immediate nuclear launch if the leadership or command system is threatened,” officials said, underlining that the doctrine removes ambiguity around decision-making in a crisis.

North Korea has adopted an increasingly overt nuclear posture in recent years. In 2022, Pyongyang adopted a law outlining conditions for nuclear use, including pre-emptive strikes if leadership was deemed at risk. The latest constitutional revision appears to elevate those principles to the highest legal level, embedding them into the state’s governing framework.

Analysts say the shift reduces any residual uncertainty about the chain of command, while simultaneously increasing the risk of rapid escalation in the event of a perceived decapitation strike.

The change is a reaction to the Trump administration increasing use of a government decapitation strategy in its conflicts with unfriendly governments. It decapitated the Venezuelan regime with Operation Absolute Resolve on January 3 where the US government removed the sitting president of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro. It followed a similar policy with the assassination of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at the start of Operation Epic Fury, killing the leaders and many of his senior aides.

The development also comes amidst heightened tensions on the Korean peninsula, with North Korea accelerating weapons testing and South Korea and the United States expanding joint military exercises to counter Pyongyang’s advancing missile capabilities.

Critics warn that hard coding the nuclear strike doctrine into the constitution raises the risk of miscalculation. In scenarios where leadership communications are disrupted — whether through cyber operations, conventional strikes or technical failures — the threshold for nuclear use could be dangerously lowered.

Supporters of the move within North Korea’s strategic establishment see the change as an insurance policy making an attack on North Korea even more unlikely thanks to its nuclear deterrent.

The lack of transparency around North Korea’s command-and-control systems leaves significant uncertainty over how such a policy would be implemented in practice. The doctrine assumes the existence of robust fail-safe mechanisms capable of authorising a launch even under degraded conditions.

It is likely that North Korea has also put a Decentralized Mosaic Defence doctrine (DMD) in place, similar to that implemented by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), following the death of Khamenei, as part of the growing CRINK cooperation. Tehran had already planned for the possibility that the US would kill its leader and the policy broke the IRGC troops into 31 autonomous cells with standing orders to continue the fight without the need for a functioning central command.