Kim will ‘resolutely’ respond to nuclear fire with atomic weapons
The North Korean leader said that Pyongyang would use the atomic bomb in the event of a nuclear attack against his country.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
AFP
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has vowed to use the atomic bomb in the event of a nuclear attack on his country, according to state media on Saturday, after an intercontinental ballistic missile was fired by Pyongyang. Pyongyang “will resolutely react to nuclear weapons with nuclear weapons and to an all-out confrontation with a merciless confrontation”, declared Kim Jong Un, quoted by the North Korean agency KCNA, which specifies that he himself supervised the Friday missile launch.
The United States, South Korea and Japan have stepped up joint military maneuvers in recent months since Kim Jong Un declared in September that North Korea’s nuclear state status was “irreversible”. Seoul and Washington notably conducted the largest joint air exercises in their history in late October and early November. But North Korea sees these shows of force as general rehearsals for an invasion of its territory or an attempt to overthrow the regime.
KCNA reported that Kim attended the launch “with his beloved daughter and wife.” State media showed a beaming Kim walking past a giant missile, accompanied by a little girl in a puffer jacket and red shoes. It is extremely rare for state media to mention the North Korean leader’s children, and it would be one of the first official confirmations of his daughter’s existence, experts say.
A new generation
KCNA said Friday’s test was for North Korea’s “new type of ICBM,” the Hwasong-17, and that the “test firing clearly proved the reliability of this new weapon system.” major strategy. “Kim Jong Un said he came to confirm that once again the DPRK’s nuclear forces have reached a new reliable maximum capacity to contain any nuclear threat,” KCNA added, using the acronym of the official name of the DPRK. North Korea.
North Korea’s national news agency said the missile reached “a maximum altitude of 6040.9 km and traveled a distance of 999.2 km” before “accurately landing on the pre-determined area” in the Sea of the East, or Sea of Japan. The distance and elevation match estimates given by Seoul and Tokyo on Friday, and are only slightly lower than those of the ICBM fired by Pyongyang on March 24, which appears to be the most powerful test ever carried out by the North.
An unprecedented flurry of fire
North Korea had already claimed to have tested on March 24 a Hwasong-17 – which is among the most powerful weapons in Pyongyang and which has been dubbed the “monster missile” by military analysts – but Seoul then put in doubt this assertion. This time, analysts said it appeared the North had succeeded. Pyongyang unleashed an unprecedented flurry of missile strikes in early November, one of which fell near South Korea’s territorial waters.
November 2 alone saw 23 North Korean missile launches, more than all of 2017, when leader Kim Jong Un and then-US President Donald Trump threatened each other with a nuclear apocalypse. In September and October, Pyongyang had already fired a copious salvo of projectiles, one of which had flown over Japan for the first time in five years.
According to Soo Kim, a former analyst with the US intelligence agency CIA, Friday’s launch is a testament to “the permanence of the Kim regime’s weapons program, as it is integral to its own survival and the continuity of the regime’s rule. his family”. “This even partly answers questions surrounding the succession,” the analyst, now at the RAND Corporation, told AFP. “We saw with our own eyes the fourth generation of Kims. And his daughter – as well as other possible brothers and sisters will certainly be prepared by her father,” she noted.
AFP
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