PYONGYANG (AFP) – North Korea’s Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of leader Kim Jong Un, has warned that her country will stage more displays of military might in response to a new agreement between South Korea and the United States to intensify nuclear deterrence to counter threats from Pyongyang.
The agreement reached this week between Washington and Seoul to shore up South Korean nuclear security will only worsen the situation and demonstrates “extreme” hostility towards North Korea, Kim Yo Jong said, according to a report in state media on Saturday.
North Korea is now convinced it must further perfect a “nuclear war deterrent”, Kim Yo Jong said, according to comments published by the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
“The more the enemies are dead set on staging nuclear war exercises and the more nuclear assets they deploy in the vicinity of the Korean peninsula, the stronger the exercise of our right to self-defence will become in direct proportion to them,” she said, according to KCNA.
The U.S.-South Korea agreement will “only result in making peace and security of Northeast Asia and the world be exposed to more serious danger, and it is an act that can thus never be welcome”, she said.
Kim Yo Jong also blasted U.S. president Joe Biden over his warning that North Korean nuclear aggression would result in the end of the Kim regime, describing the U.S. leader as being “too miscalculating and irresponsibly brave”.
North Korea would not simply dismiss Biden’s words as a “nonsensical remark from the person in his dotage”, she added.
“When we consider that this expression was personally used by the president of the U.S., our most hostile adversary, it is threatening rhetoric for which he should be prepared for far too great an after-storm.”
South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and Biden this week issued what was titled the Washington Declaration, bolstering the U.S. nuclear umbrella over South Korea. The declaration involves “regular deployment of strategic assets”, including the first South Korean port visit by a U.S. nuclear ballistic submarine in decades, a Washington official told the AFP news agency this week.
North Korea, which has been under harsh sanctions by the United States and the United Nations Security Council for years over its nuclear and ballistic missiles programs, launched an unprecedented number of missiles in 2022, including its most advanced intercontinental ballistic missile ever.
On March 23, North Korea said it had tested its first underwater nuclear attack drone, and hailed that the weapon was capable of inflicting substantial damage on enemy targets.
Ahead of the test, the North Korean leader urged the enhancement of the country’s nuclear force’s capability to the level of becoming ready for an actual “attack” against the enemy.