Satellite, 'poopaganda', missiles: What's North Korea up to?

SEOUL, South Korea — A failed satellite launch, floating hundreds of trash-filled balloons into the South, and firing a volley of 10 short-range ballistic missiles: North Korea has had a busy week.

AFP takes a look at what's going on:

The flurry of activity can be seen as an angry retort from Kim Jong Un's regime to China, South Korea and Japan, experts say, specifically their joint statement this week targeting Kim Jong Un's nuclear weapons.

The three countries held a rare summit on Monday, where they said they remained committed to the "denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula".

It's a standard phrase the trio -- even key Pyongyang diplomatic ally and trading partner China -- have long used.

Kim Jong Un himself, at a high-profile 2018 summit in Singapore with then-US president Donald Trump signed a joint declaration committing to work towards "complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula".

And Kim meant it, former South Korean president Moon Jae-in said in a recent memoir, adding he believed Pyongyang's young leader would have forsaken his nuclear programme "if there was a guarantee of regime survival".

Since Kim's second summit with Trump collapsed in Hanoi in 2019, North Korea has abandoned diplomacy, doubling down on weapons development and rejecting Washington's offers of talks.

It's also overhauled its laws. While Pyongyang first called itself a "nuclear-armed state" in its constitution back in 2012, it passed a new law in 2022 that Kim said made that status "irreversible".

The law also outlined the command and control structure for the country's nuclear weapons -- with Kim firmly at the top -- and spelled out the country's right to carry out pre-emptive strikes "automatically" if threatened.

The new status was formally enshrined in North Korea's constitution in 2023.

This week, it said efforts to dismantle the country's nuclear arsenal were equivalent to denying the country's "constitutional position" and a "grave political provocation".

North Korea is showing their "discomfort towards China" for allowing denuclearisation to be included in the joint statement with Japan and the South, Yang Moo-jin, president of the University of North Korean Studies