Are we really about to go to war with North Korea?

Probably not, but that doesn't mean Kim isn't ratcheting up the tensions for no reason.

Last month, seemingly out of nowhere, two experts on North Korea, Robert Carlin, a former CIA analyst who took part in prior US-NK negotiations, and Siegfried Hecker, a nuclear scientist with knowledge of the territory, unleashed a bomb on the foreign policy community. The headline grabber was the following statement:

We believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war.

While this pronouncement from two renowned North Korea specialists set off some alarm bells, many experts have been quick to excoriate this line of thinking as premature. The BBC spoke with seven North Korea experts from around the world, and all seven disagreed with the idea that Kim was preparing for an imminent war. That being said, they did agree that North Korea is getting more belligerent and that North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un should not be ignored.

So what is going on here? What set Kim off? And what could possibly happen?

A timeline of recent events in the region