At a ruling Workers’ party meeting that concluded this week, Kim Jong-un declared that steadily expanding North Korea’s nuclear forces was the “most correct and unique way” to cope with an increasingly unstable world, citing what he described as growing threats from the US and its allies.The remarks were just the latest in a recent stream of commentary from North Korea’s leadership that has seen Kim pledge to equip warships with nuclear missiles, double weapons grade production and expand the country’s nuclear arsenal at “an exponential rate”.North Korea often makes exaggerated claims about the strength of their defence capabilities, but behind the heightened rhetoric, analysts say the question is no longer whether North Korea has nuclear weapons, but why it appears to need so many.“It is a force so large and so dispersed that no single strike could eliminate it, and [appears] increasingly difficult to dismantle through diplomacy,” says Peter Ward, a research fellow at the Sejong Institute in Seoul, who believes North Korea is using the spread of its arsenal to protect against intervention of the kind seen in Iran.“We don’t know where all of them are. We don’t know what they might do. And their threats are deliberately vague.”Kim Jon-un and his daughter observing the trials of a destroyer in early June.The recent US-led strikes on Iran reinforced a lesson North Korea has long since absorbed: states that stop short of a fully operational nuclear arsenal invite attack rather than deterrence.“A country that remains at the threshold level is drawing a big fat target on its back”, says Ward.Designed to survive a first strike, North Korea’s arsenal spans rail and road-mobile launchers, hardened underground facilities and an expanding submarine fleet.This year North Korea began test-firing nuclear-capable cruise missiles from a new 5,000-tonne destroyer, and on Wednesday Kim pledged that the country would build another two warships every year for the next five years.Analysts say Pyongyang believes it needs a much larger arsenal to match the scale and complexity of the forces aligned against it.