North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un could launch another intercontinental ballistic missile within weeks, according to a top South Korean official wary of a nuclear attack from the communist regime.

“I think there is a possibility of North Korea launching an ICBM this December,” South Korean deputy national security adviser Kim Tae-hyo told reporters Thursday at Washington Dulles International Airport.

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He arrived in Washington just weeks after North Korea boasted that it had placed a surveillance satellite in orbit. That breakthrough, which is believed to have come courtesy of new assistance from Russia, stokes the pressure that the United States and its key allies in the region face from the pariah regime.

“Whether that ballistic missile is long or short, if a nuclear [weapon] is loaded onto it, it becomes a nuclear threat and a nuclear attack against us,” the South Korean official said, per Yonhap News Agency.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s team has struck a frank and ominous tone in response to North Korea’s combination of belligerence and improving missile arsenal. Even so, the deputy national security adviser’s remarks provided a striking — and, for Korea policy experts, somewhat perplexing — preamble to the Nuclear Consultative Group session that brought him to the United States.

“That is odd language,” former CIA deputy division chief for Korea Bruce Klingner, the Heritage Foundation’s senior research fellow for northeast Asia, told the Washington Examiner. “I don't think it's a signal [that] we will try to intercept [a missile], or we would attack North Korea, if they only launched a missile out into the Pacific Ocean.”

It also points to the analytical quandary that the U.S., South Korea, and Japan face as a result of North Korea’s habitual testing of missiles.

“It reinforces that … they have to make relatively quick decisions about whether something from North Korea is a test or a launch [of an] attack against one of those countries,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior fellow Anthony Ruggiero, a former White House National Security Council official, told the Washington Examiner. “This is a country, in South Korea, that has to be concerned [that] something that might look like a ‘test’ is actually the beginning of a conflict with North Korea — starting with missiles, and then following up with military action.”

South Korea and the U.S. signed a mutual defense treaty in 1953 after North Korea’s invasion of the former started a three-year conflict that brought U.S. and Chinese forces to blows and ended in an armistice. The North Korean regime’s regular missile launches have raised the specter of a renewed conflict in the years to come.

“North Korea continues to advance its nuclear and missile capability,” South Korean defense minister Shin Won-Sik said in November while hosting Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. “It's making blatant threats of nuclear usage by stipulating offensive nuclear force policy in its constitution. We can never accept any nuclear attack by North Korea, and if it does use nuclear weapons, North Korea will face immediate, overwhelming, and decisive response from the Republic of Korea and the United States which will lead to the end of the Kim regime.”

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That statement echoed President Joe Biden’s language during a state visit from his South Korean counterpart in April, when he told reporters that a nuclear attack on South Korea would "result in the end of whatever regime [decided] to take such an action.” Kim, the South Korean deputy national security adviser, may be trying this week to make North Korean officials anxious about any step that might be perceived as too provocative — such as a test of a nuclear-armed missile.

“North Korea has to understand that there are consequences if they go beyond a certain level,” Ruggiero said. “Depending on if it's walked back ... this seems to be their red line: That if it’s loaded, regardless of whether it's launched toward South Korea or Japan, that it’d be seen as an attack.”