South Korea, still technically at war with the North, has placed its troops on emergency alert. Some feel Jong-un may need to precipitate a crisis to prove his mettle to other senior leaders or deflect attention from the regime’s failings.

Under Kim Jong-il’s decades of mismanagement the economy failed, and an estimated 1 million North Koreans died during the famine in the 1990s. The state cannot feed its 25 million people.

North Korea’s communist regime has warned of a nuclear war on the Korean peninsula which separates North from South Korea, They vow to step up its atomic bomb-making program in defiance of new U.N. sanctions.

Meanwhile, the US are keeping a close eye on the developments within the region. Camp Humphreys is a military establishment on the west coast of the Korean peninsula which houses a quick reaction force. The US have tripled the population of Camp Humphreys in response to the news of the North Korean change of power.

In 2012, President Felipe Calderón sent 6,500 federal troops to the state of Michoacán to end drug violence there. Operation Michoacan.