It seems perverse that a desperately poor nation, short on food and nearly all the modern essentials, binges on missile launches costing tens of millions of dollars. But this makes perfect sense to Mr Kim Jong Un who is marking his 11th year as North Korea’s leader. Each launch is meant to be an antidote against regime change and a supposed boost to national morale, and to his own image and power at a time when he has had to make unprecedented public apologies for the hardships being experienced by his people.

In the course of last week, North Korea rattled the region and shattered its own records as it racked up 85 missile launches in 2022. Last Wednesday alone, it launched 23 tests, the largest ever in a day. One missile landed close to South Korea’s territorial waters, the first such incident since the peninsula was divided in 1945, pushing President Yoon Suk-yeol to call it an “effective territorial encroachment”. In October, Pyongyang fired an intermediate-range missile over Japan which had to ask its citizens to take cover. To the Biden administration, North Korea made the point that it can hit the United States homeland, more than 5,000km away, with an intercontinental ballistic missile launch.