WASHINGTON – North Korea’s leader brandished the threat of nuclear war Monday in a fire-eating speech marking the 90^th anniversary of the founding of the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army, which includes all the North’s armed forces.

In his most menacing tirade to date, Kim Jong-un called on his “nuclear forces” to be “strengthened in terms of both quality and scale so they can perform nuclear combat capabilities in any situations of warfare.”

Talking at night in the dramatic setting of Kim Il Sung Square in central Pyongyang following a military parade featuring strutting soldiers and the North’s latest-model missiles, the strongman raised the stakes against enemies near and far. “The prevailing situation demands more proactive measures,” he said, vowing increased emphasis on “developing the nuclear forces of our state at the fastest possible speed.”

The North Korean leader’s remarks were clearly a warning to both America and South Korea that he has every intention of challenging the South’s incoming conservative president, Yoon Suk-yeol, from the moment he’s inaugurated on May 10. Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency carried the entire text of the speech in English translation, and Korean Central TV live-streamed the parade for an international audience.

Mr. Kim’s speech strongly indicated he would be ordering the North’s seventh nuclear test — its last was conducted September 2017 — in an atmosphere of rising hostility between North and South Korea and also between the North and America and Japan.

Mr. Kim and the South’s outgoing president, Moon Jae-in, exchanged cordial letters last week harking back to their three summits in 2018, and Mr. Moon on Tuesday called for renewed North-South dialog. North Korea has not responded to such pleas, even while demanding an end to sanctions imposed by Washington and the United Nations.

Although the threat of war seemingly is not imminent, Kim Jong-un made clear he did not view the North’s nuclear arsenal as merely a deterrent.

“The fundamental mission of our nuclear forces is to deter a war,” he said, “but our nukes can never be confined to the single mission of war deterrent even at a time when a situation we are not desirous of at all is created on this land.”

If the North’s “fundamental interests” were violated, he promised, “our nuclear forces will have to decisively accomplish its unexpected second mission.” Thus, he added, “the nuclear forces of our Republic should be fully prepared to fulfill their responsible mission and put their unique deterrent in motion at any time.”

Just how prepared is Mr. Kim to make good on such threats is far from clear, but North Korea is believed to have about 60 warheads. Most of them are presumably in the North’s main nuclear facility at Yongbyon, about 60 miles north of Pyongyang, and other warheads may well be stored in caves and tunnels around the country.

North Korea’s KCTV showed crowds cheering and waving North Korean flags as the North’s latest missiles trundled by, strapped onto huge multi-wheeled vehicles. The Hwasong 17, widely regarded as the North’s newest, most fearsome missile, was in evidence, but some analysts believed a new solid-fuel missile was also on display.

“North Korea rolled out what appeared to be a new type of solid-fuel missile alongside the country’s largest-known intercontinental ballistic missile,” a website in Seoul that tracks North Korea, NK News, said. NK News quoted Ankit Panda at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington as saying the new missile looked like “a variation of North Korea’s Pukguksong solid-fueled missile series.”

Mr. Pandit added, however, that it was “a little curious why the North Koreans have these three large diameter solid fuel missiles that they have not yet flight-tested.”

North Korea also showed off what looked like a version of a submarine-launched ballistic missile capable of being fired from under water quite close to the shores of its target country. “The small SLBM appeared to have a sharper warhead tip,” an independent website, navalnews.com, said. “This variation of SLBMs with different ranges seems to indicate that they will be deployed in a very short time.”

The new SLBM, navalnews.com said, “has a larger warhead and length than the Pukguksung-5” and a much longer range.” It’s “capable of carrying MIRVs (multiple independent reentry vehicles) that can destroy multiple cities at once….”

North Korea has claimed an ICBM that it test-fired last month was a Hwasong-17, but Korean and American analysts believe it was an earlier-model Hwasong-15. Either model, of course, is capable of hitting targets anywhere in the U.S.

Equally important, the North has recently test-fired short-range missiles that could hit anywhere in South Korea, placing within easy range America’s single largest overseas base, Camp Humphreys, 40 miles south of Seoul.

South Korea is responding by building up its own inventory of short- to medium-range missiles. The South on Tuesday announced it’s ordering missile interceptors from Raytheon Technologies Corporation, with a range of more than 300 miles, according to Seoul’s Yonhap news.

That’s in addition to the South’s plan for mass-producing surface-to-surface missiles capable of mounting on transport vehicles, Yonhap said.  

These missiles, however, won’t be operational until 2034 ,while the Korean peninsula remains in a perpetual state of crisis or near-crisis with no amicable resolution in sight.