North Korea may use the visit of Joe Biden as an excuse for their first nuclear weapons test in five years, US and South Korea officials fear.
Pyongyang resumed ICBM launches this year but it has not tested a nuclear bomb since 2017.
US and South Korean officials said North Korea appeared to be preparing another intercontinental ballistic missile test that could some as soon as today or Friday, despite the country's battle with its first admitted Covid-19 outbreak.
"The preparations for the nuclear test are all over and we are just looking at the timing," a North Korean official has been quoted as saying in South Korea media.
Although US national security head Jake Sullivan said Wednesday this was a possibility, analysts and officials see it as less likely than a missile launch.
Explaining Kim's likely motivation for a fresh missile launch, Ankit Panda, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said on Twitter he
had used "the accomplishments of the national defence industry as a beacon in the dark economic times of the last two years."
Panda said even a nuclear or missile test shouldn't stop Washington and Seoul from offering unconditional aid for North
Korea's Covid fight as the country grapples with its first publicly acknowledged mass outbreak.
Yoon has offered to help North Korea with its Covid crisis, and analysts expect Biden to endorse this effort, even though his administration has said it has no plans to send vaccines directly to North Korea and Pyongyang has refused help though
the global vaccine initiative.
The White House also said Biden would not visit the heavily fortified Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) that divides North and South
Korea, a change of plans from last week, when such a trip was under consideration.
Biden has stuck to a policy of keeping the door open to diplomacy with North Korea, while rejecting the idea, favoured by China and Russia, of offering sanctions relief to Pyongyang before it takes steps to dismantle its nuclear weapons programme.
