New Delhi, June 7 -- The complaint came not from a diplomat but from a weapons official, and the target was not a missile or a warship but a bomb-guidance kit. That distinction, buried in a Sunday dispatch from state media, carries the real weight of what Pyongyang signaled this week.

collectively valued at $106 million - a "reckless" act that was deliberately compounding military instability on the Korean Peninsula. The statement, carried by the Korean Central News Agency, was attributed to a deputy director of the ministry's General Armaments Bureau, a technical procurement body rarely deployed for political messaging.

It was the second such condemnation in less than three weeks. On May 21, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson denounced a ...