highly charged issues = ?

highly charged issues = issues that catch fully attention?

Context:
The basic premises about North Korea, which inform policy development,
scholarly debate and journalism, have been built from information that
is largely founded on inference from isolated and de-contextualised data,
speculation, ideological assumptions and worst-case scenarios. None of
this is unusual as a way of interpreting highly charged issues of
international security. What is unusual is the extent to which such
'knowledge' circulates as an unquestioned body of factually-based
evidence and analysis and forms the foundation of major Western powers'
intelligence estimates. It provides at best a sometimes skewed
perspective and at worst a false picture, and almost every issue on
which there is supposedly 'common knowledge' of North Korea contains
this whole spectrum of knowledge distortion.