Features | Diplomacy | East Asia

North Korea’s Quiet Campaign to Be a ‘Responsible’ Nuclear Power

As U.N. sanctions enforcement fragments, Pyongyang is waging a second contest – over status – that is visible only in the original Korean.

In this file photo, provided on April 14, 2023, by KCNA, Kim Jong Un and his daughter observe the test-launch of the Hwasong-18 ICBM at an undisclosed location in North Korea.

In October 2025, the Multilateral Sanctions Monitoring Team (MSMT) – an 11-state coalition formed in 2024 to replace the now defunct United Nations Panel of Experts on North Korea (PoE) – released its second report, detailing how Pyongyang funds its weapons programs through cyber theft and information-technology worker fraud. The team estimated that North Korea stole roughly $1.6 billion in cryptocurrency in the first three quarters of 2025 alone. 

That the coalition exists at all is because the U.N.’s own monitoring body collapsed: in 2024, Russia vetoed the renewal of the PoE, ending the universal sanctions consensus that had governed the North Korea file since 2006.

The Panel of Experts reported to the U.N. Security Council (UNSC) and carried the authority of a universal mandate; the MSMT is a voluntary coalition of like-minded states that can investigate and publish but cannot bind the governments that decline to take part. Russia and China, no longer inside the monitoring body, now dispute its findings from the outside. For states inclined to trade with, or quietly tolerate, North Korea, the difference between a UNSC mandate and a coalition communiqué is the difference between an obligation and an opinion. The MSMT’s own members have asked the UNSC to rebuild the PoE in the form it had before – an implicit acknowledgment that documentation, however thorough, is not the same as universal enforcement.

Analysts have discussed in depth the repercussions of the end of the PoE. But while the end of international accountability attracts attention, there is a parallel effort on Pyongyang’s part to change how the world understands North Korea’s actions. That campaign is being conducted in Korean, in the laws and state media that form the regime’s authoritative register. These nuances are routinely lost in the English summaries that most foreign analysts actually read.

In September 2022, the Supreme People’s Assembly codified North Korea’s status as a nuclear weapons state and framed the program as a permanent fixture of national security rather than a bargaining chip. Notably, the law was made possible by a diplomatic shift: the May 2022 Russian and Chinese vetoes of a U.S.-drafted sanctions resolution. It was the first time a UNSC effort to sanction North Korea had been blocked since the first such resolution passed in 2006, and it ended nearly two decades of great-power consensus. Two years later, the PoE disbandment and the deepening North Korea-Russia partnership marked the definitive end of nearly two decades of great power consensus on opposition to North Korea’s nuclear program.

As international pressure fades, North Korea has stepped up its rhetorical efforts to frame its nuclear program as justified and necessary. Three terms, recurring across its state media, show the campaign at work.

First, North Korea increasingly describes itself as a “responsible nuclear-weapons state” (책임 있는 핵보유국). English coverage typically renders this as “nuclear-armed state” or “nuclear power,” dropping the adjective 책임 있는, “responsible.” That erases Pyongyang’s intended meaning.

“Responsible” deliberately borrows the vocabulary that the established nuclear powers use about their own arsenals. Co-opting the term positions North Korea not as a rogue proliferator but as a status-quo nuclear state entitled to comparable treatment. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), does not recognize latecomer nuclear states; “responsible” is an attempt to manufacture such a status. 

Washington and Seoul continue to oppose Pyongyang’s nuclear status; Beijing and Moscow (among others) might be persuaded to accept a “responsible” nuclear North Korea. Importantly, it’s China and Russia whose North Korea policies........

© The Diplomat