OAN Staff Jenna Lee
10:21 AM – Tuesday, May 12, 2026
North Korea’s updated constitution now requires a retaliatory nuclear strike if leader Kim Jong Un is assassinated by a foreign power.
The update came after the joint U.S.-Israeli forces killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his closest advisors in an Israeli strike on his compound in Tehran on February 28th.
“If the command-and-control system over the state’s nuclear forces is placed in danger by hostile forces’ attacks … a nuclear strike shall be launched automatically and immediately,” read the revised Article 3 of North Korea’s nuclear-policy law.
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The constitutional revision was likely approved during a North Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly session, which opened on March 22nd in Pyongyang, and was briefed to South Korean senior government officials. It was only made public last week, the New York Times reported.
Although the North Korean dictator already controls the country’s nuclear forces, the update in the constitution makes it clear about what should happen in the case that he is assassinated.
“This may have been policy before, but it has added emphasis now it has been enshrined in the constitution. Iran was the wake-up call. North Korea saw the remarkable efficiency of the U.S.-Israeli decapitation attacks, which immediately eliminated the greater part of the Iranian leadership, and they must now be terrified,” said Andrei Lankov, an international relations professor at Kookmin University in Seoul, South Korea.
The constitutional revision also includes changes defining North Korea’s territory as bordering South Korea and removing references to reunification, reflecting Kim’s push to formally treat the two Koreas as separate states.
The change to Article 2, which is the first time the nation added a territorial clause to its constitution, says that North Korea’s territory includes land “bordering the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation to the north and the Republic of Korea to the south.”
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