DPRK leader Kim Jong-un announced on Thursday that Pyongyang’s nuclear war deterrent was fully ready to respond to threats. Such saber-rattling is nothing new from Kim, but it does come after a slew of artillery and missile tests.
In a speech marking the 69th anniversary of the armistice that halted the 1950-1953 Korean War, Kim accused South Korea of pursuing suicidal confrontation against North Korea in a bid to deepen ties with the US imperialists.
Our armed forces are now fully prepared to cope with any sort of crisis, and our state’s nuclear war deterrent is also fully ready to demonstrate its absolute power accurately and promptly true to its mission.
The North Korean leader also accused Washington and Seoul of planning on stationing nuclear missiles in South Korea.
While South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol said last year that he would ask the USA to deploy tactical nukes in his country, the Biden administration has ruled out the idea for now.
North Korea is estimated to have between 40 and 50 nuclear warheads, with the capability of producing six or seven more every year, according to the Arms Control Association. The USA officially removed its nuclear weapons from South Korea in 1991.
Successive members of the Kim family have threatened for decades to step up development or deployment of these weapons in order to demand relief from international sanctions, or to get Western powers to the negotiating table.
This scenario played out during the tenure of US President Donald Trump, with Kim and Trump threatening each other with nuclear annihilation throughout 2017, before meeting in person for two historic summits in 2018 and 2019.
While Trump’s overtures to Kim failed to achieve his goal of de-nuclearization on the Korean peninsula, they calmed the nuclear threats from Pyongyang for the remainder of his term in office. However, the North Korean military has stepped up its activity in recent months.
The South Korean military claimed earlier this month to have detected trajectories consistent with artillery shelling, and said in June that the north had fired projectiles from multiple rocket launchers and test-fired eight short-range ballistic missiles eastward.
The north is ready to conduct its seventh nuclear test at any time, Sung Kim, the US special representative to North Korea, claimed in June, after a lull in testing since an underground detonation in 2017.
On the other side, the USA and South Korea are preparing for military drills in August. Pyongyang considers such exercises provocations or rehearsals for an invasion.
Earlier this month, the USA sent six F-35 stealth fighter jets to South Korea for a series of exercises, which Seoul said were aimed at demonstrating the strong deterrence of the US-South Korea alliance.
RT. com / ABC Flash Point News 2022.
Koreans must never, ever fight other Koreans. They are one family, one blood. War between North and South only benefits the Americans, who delight in pitting brother against brother, while looting the countries involved. Look to Ukraine as an illustration, where Slavs are made to fight their brother Slavs from Russia, while America strips Ukraine of its natural wealth, its women, and its children.
Busy with the Ukraine war, America is ignoring some really bad signs in foreign politics ! And is not just North Korea !