SEOUL — North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un foresees an unprecedented leap in his nuclear program in answer to what he calls “the worst actual threat” posed by “the triangular alliance” of America, Japan, and South Korea.

Mr. Kim vastly raised the nuclear stakes on the Korean peninsula Thursday following his whirlwind tour this month of military facilities in the Russian far east in which he talked with President Putin about acquiring the technology needed for his nuclear weapons and missiles.

Why, though, did Mr. Kim wait until now to say he was taking his nuclear program to by far its highest  level? He spoke the day after the North released an American soldier, Travis King. The Army private had dashed across the North-South line into the hands of the North Koreans in July. 

The timing was uncanny.  As Mr. Kim was orating before his rubber-stamp Supreme People’s Assembly, Private King was arriving in American military custody at a base at San Antonio after having been held by the North Koreans for 71 days.

“It almost does not make sense,” a former Marine and Pentagon intelligence analyst, Bruce Bechtol, tells the Sun. “The speed with which they have gone about releasing him and ‘expelling’ him from the country is also very unusual.”

“In past cases they have held on to ‘defectors’ for years,” said Mr. Bechtol, author of numerous books and articles on North Korea’s leadership. “This is very unprecedented behavior.”

One thing was for sure. The release of Private King could not be seen as portending anything like a “thaw” in the worsening confrontation between Pyongyang and Washinggton. Could it be, however, that Mr. Kim, by getting rid of him, wanted to remove the distraction of his case before turning again to what appears to be uppermost on his mind — girding for war? 

In his 3,800-word diatribe, carried in English by Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency, Mr. Kim called for “exponentially boosting the production of nuclear weapons and diversifying the nuclear strike means and deploying them in different services.” The inference was that North Korea’s naval, air and ground forces might all eventually have nukes in their inventories.

Mr. Kim’s rhetorical outburst was his answer to ongoing joint American-South Korean military exercises. Buoyed by his talks with the Russians, he focused on the bond formed by America, South Korea, and Japan at the Camp David meeting between Presidents Biden and Yoon and Prime Minister Yoshida.

The Americans, Mr. Kim said, were “resuming the large-scale nuclear war joint drills with clear aggressive nature.” Washington, he added, was deploying “its strategic nuclear assets near the Korean peninsula on a permanent basis” — a response to exercises in which aircraft carriers and submarines are said to carry nuclear warheads. 

Mr. Kim’s remarks clearly reflected a new-found confidence in the wake of reassurances by the Russians that they would provide him with the technology needed to show his brave-sounding words were more than mere rhetoric

But is Mr. Kim confident enough to order a seventh nuclear test? North Korea has not tested a nuclear device since conducting its sixth test in 2017. Despite predictions that a test was imminent, he’s  believed to have hesitated under pressure from China, the North’s main ally and source of most of its oil. North Korea is believed to have fabricated at least 60 — and maybe more than 100 — nukes.

Now, as Mr. Kim builds on his relationships with the Russians, he may muster the nerve to flex the country’s nuclear muscles again by staging an underground test in defiance of the Chinese. As China writhes in new economic difficulties, President Xi is believed reluctant to risk a costly confrontation with America and its allies, including both Japan and South Korea.

Russia, bogged down in Ukraine and suffering from its own economic duress, dangles before North Korea the vision of new heights as  the world’s ninth  nuclear power. Might the Russians resolve the North’s frustrations?

North Korea has twice failed in recent months to put a satellite into orbit. Nor have the North’s physicists and engineers figured out how to miniaturize a nuclear warhead to fit on the tip of a long-range ballistic missile capable of reaching targets in North America. 

The Russians could help solve both these problems in return for a massive influx of North Korean artillery shells for their troops in Ukraine that Mr. Kim would like to supply. The sticking point, of course, is whether the North has the means to produce them fast enough — a problem Mr. Kim is leaving for another day.