State media has reported that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un visited a weapons-grade uranium enrichment plant, releasing images of the facility and revealing its existence to the global public for the first time. The reports did not reveal the location of the plant or its production capacity. (New York Times)

The release of the photos will provide foreign intelligence agencies as well as open-source sleuths with a wealth of information to better determine North Korea’s nuclear capabilities, which makes it important from a global security perspective. But at the same time, the existence of a facility like this isn’t news: The world has known for almost 15 years that, in addition to a plutonium enrichment program, North Korea operates a parallel program for uranium enrichment.

But the decision to reveal this information publicly, with images, for the first time is notable, as is the timing of that decision. Unlike North Korea’s recent round of “garbage balloon diplomacy” with South Korea—a deeply unserious but symbolically important action—the attempt today to draw global attention back to the country’s nuclear capabilities is much more significant.

In particular, it is difficult not to reach the conclusion that the timing is related to the upcoming U.S. presidential election in November, especially because North Korea has essentially disappeared as a policy issue for Washington under the Biden administration. That stands in stark contrast to the four years of the Trump administration, when a whiplash-inducing succession of threats, diplomacy, leaders’ summits and ultimately failed negotiations over North Korea’s expanding nuclear program kept the issue top of mind in Washington and around the world. North Korea has continued to advance its nuclear and missile programs in recent years, but those developments haven’t cut through the noise in Washington the way they did before.

Of course, that’s mainly because the issue appears to have reached an impasse. There won’t be any progress in diplomatic engagement with North Korea as long as the U.S. continues to insist on denuclearization. But even though that boat has long since sailed, Biden can’t push for anything less, let alone acknowledge that North Korea is already a nuclear power, because doing so would be a political liability in Washington, opening him up to partisan charges of being weak and feckless. It would also be an alliance management problem in East Asia, at a time when Japan and, in particular, South Korea are already increasingly uncomfortable with relying exclusively on the U.S. nuclear umbrella for deterring a potential North Korean nuclear attack. Instead of taking that risk, the Biden administration elected to largely ignore the issue.

The release of the images today suggests that Kim now wants to get Washington’s attention back and knows that nuclear developments are the best way to do so. Whether he escalates that effort by conducting another test detonation of a nuclear warhead—the ultimate attention-grabber—is the next question.

For more: Read all our coverage of North Korea and nuclear weapons.