North Korea Forum

North Korea ultimately wants to have more nuclear weapons to use against the U.S. troops in South Korea and Japan in the event of an invasion, according to a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. North Korea currently has the ability to use a small number of nuclear weapons against the United States, said Jeffrey Lewis, a professor on arms control. “They have some deterrence, but what I think the North Koreans really, fundamentally want is the ability to use a much larger number of nuclear weapons against U.S. forces in South Korea and Japan if they thought an invasion was underway,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Monday. “This is part of [an] … alarming change in the way they approach nuclear weapons, and that change is really to give themselves the ability to use nuclear weapons first if they think they are about to be invaded,” he said. His comments came after North Korea conducted another missile test on Sunday. State news agency KCNA reported that Ki