North Korea's Kim holds meeting on bolstering nuclear forces

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un convened a key military meeting to discuss bolstering the country's nuclear arsenal and putting its armed forces on high alert, state media reported Sunday, in Kim's first known public appearance in about 20 days.

Kim earlier this month quelled intense rumors about his health by attending a ceremony marking the completion of a fertilizer factory in what at the time was his first public appearance in 20 days. But he hadn’t made another public appearance for around 20 more days until the North's official news agency said Sunday that he led a meeting of the Central Military Commission of the ruling Workers’ Party.

“Set forth at the meeting were new policies for further increasing the nuclear war deterrence of the country and putting the strategic armed forces on a high alert operation,” the Korean Central News Agency, or KCNA, said, without mentioning when the meeting was held.

The meeting discussed increasing the capabilities for deterring “the threatening foreign forces,” the report said, an apparent reference to the U.S. and South Korean militaries.

Kim, who heads the military commission, also used the meeting to promote the ranks of dozens of army generals and others in an apparent effort to boost military morale. Among them is military chief Pak Jong Chon, who was made a vice marshal, and Ri Pyong Chol, a senior party official in charge of weapons development, who became a deputy head of the military commission, according to KCNA.

Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul, said that Kim's “public appearances have more to do with domestic politics than international signaling, but it is interesting for him to reappear in state media about the time the world started noticing he’d been gone for three weeks again.”

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