North Korea has warned the United States not to take provocative action in the region, saying it is “ready to hit back with nuclear attacks”.
The comments came as North Korea marked the 105th anniversary of the birth of its founding president, Kim Il-sung on Saturday.
The country paraded its intercontinental ballistwic missiles in a massive military display in central Pyongyang; with ruler Kim Jong Un looking on with delight as his nation flaunted its increasingly sophisticated military hardware amid rising regional tensions.
Kim did not speak during the annual parade, which celebrates the 1912 birthday of his late grandfather Kim Il Sung, North Korea’s founding ruler, but a top official warned that the North would stand up to any threat posed by the United States.
Choe Ryong Hae said President Donald Trump was guilty of “creating a war situation” on the Korean Peninsula by dispatching U.S. forces to the region.
“We will respond to an all-out war with an all-out war and a nuclear war with our style of a nuclear attack,” said Choe, widely seen by analysts as North Korea’s No. 2 official.
The parade, the annual highlight of North Korea’s most important holiday, came amid growing international worries that North Korea may be preparing for its sixth nuclear test or a major missile launch, such as its first flight test of an ICBM capable of reaching U.S. shores.
But if the parade signaled a readiness for war, North Korea has long insisted that its goal is peace — and survival — with the growing arsenal a way to ensure that the government in Pyongyang is not easily overthrown.
North Korea saw the toppling of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Moammar Gadhafi in Libya — neither of whom had nuclear weapons — as proof of the weapons’ power.
“It will be the largest of miscalculations if the United States treats us like Iraq and Libya, which are living out miserable fates as victims of aggression, and Syria, which didn’t respond immediately even after it was attacked,” said a Friday statement by the general staff of the North Korean army, according to the official Korean Central News Agency.
Also Friday, North Korea’s vice foreign minister told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview that Trump’s tweets — he recently tweeted, for example, that the North is “looking for trouble” — have inflamed tensions.
“Trump is always making provocations with his aggressive words,” Han Song Ryol said.
U.S. retaliatory strikes earlier this month against Syria over a chemical weapons attack on civilians, coupled with Trump’s dispatching of what he called an “armada” of ships to the region, touched off fears in South Korea that the United States was preparing for military action against the North.
Pyongyang has also expressed anger over the ongoing annual spring military exercises the U.S. holds with South Korea, which it considers a rehearsal for invasion.
But U.S. officials told The Associated Press on Friday that the Trump administration had settled on a policy that will emphasize increasing pressure on Pyongyang with the help of China, North Korea’s only major ally, instead of military options or trying to overthrow Kim’s regime.
A U.S. military official, who requested anonymity to discuss planning, said the United States doesn’t intend to use military force against North Korea in response to either a nuclear test or a missile launch.
A series of what appeared to be KN-08 missiles were among the weapons rolled out on trucks. Analysts say the missiles could one day be capable of hitting targets as far as the continental United States, although North Korea has yet to flight test them.
The parade also included large rockets covered by canisters in two different types of transporter erector launcher trucks, or TELs. An official from South Korea’s Defense Ministry couldn’t immediately confirm whether any of the rockets represented a new type of ICBM.
Kim Dong-yub, a North Korea expert at Seoul’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies, said the canisters and trucks suggested that the North was developing technology to “cold launch” ICBMs, ejecting them from the canisters before they ignite. This would allow North Korea to prevent its limited number of ICBM-capable launcher trucks from being damaged during launches and also make the missiles harder to detect after they’re fired, he said.
Kim, the analyst, said it’s likely that North Korea is also developing solid-fuel ICBMs, and that some of the rockets inside the canisters on Saturday might have been prototypes.
North Korea conducted two nuclear tests last year alone, advancing its goal to make nuclear weapons small enough to fit on long-range missiles. The North also last year launched a long-range rocket that put a satellite into orbit, which Washington, Seoul and others saw as a banned test of missile technology.
Amid increasing tension with North Korea, Vice President Mike Pence jetted to South Korea 0n Saturday, on a scheduled trip as part of his first official visit to the Asia-Pacific region.
The trip comes at a critical moment for the Trump administration and US allies, after escalated posturing from North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un and growing concerns that the country may pose grave security threat.
Along with his visit to Seoul, the vice president’s tour will also include stops in Tokyo, Jakarta, Sydney and Hawaii. According to a White House foreign policy adviser, the trip is intended as a chance for Pence to lay out the administration’s policies to US allies in the region, and to offer an opportunity for him to develop personal relationships with government and business leaders.
Commitment will be the key message the vice president brings to US allies in the Asia-Pacific — both on security and the economy. Officials say the primary goal of the trip will be to reinforce regional security alliances. The same foreign policy adviser stressed that they will be discussing North Korea’s “belligerency” at every stop, and that broadly speaking, military options were being assessed and would come up.
To this end, Pence will meet with the acting President of South Korea, Hwang Kyo-ahn, to reinforce the US commitment to consult with South Korea over North Korea’s ballistic missile and nuclear programs.
In meetings with South Korean leaders, officials say the vice president is prepared to discuss sanctions if the topic is raised.
“If that is raised, we’re prepared to discuss it,” said a senior administration official. “This would not open the dialogue with that, but that is, obviously, a tool at the administration’s disposal.”
Security will certainly be a key point in discussions with Japan’s Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, who said Thursday that North Korea may now have the capability to deliver missiles equipped with sarin nerve gas.
Meanwhile, China, on Friday, warned that tensions on the Korean Peninsula could spin out of control, as North Korea said it could test a nuclear weapon at any time and a United States naval group neared the peninsula — an American effort to sow doubt in Pyongyang over how President Trump might respond.
“The United States and South Korea and North Korea are engaging in tit for tat, with swords drawn and bows bent, and there have been storm clouds gathering,” China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, said in Beijing, according to Xinhua, the state news agency.
“If they let war break out on the peninsula, they must shoulder that historical culpability and pay the corresponding price for this,” Mr. Wang said.
The comments were unusually blunt from China, which has been trying to steer between the Trump administration’s demands for it to do more to stop North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and its longstanding reluctance to risk a rupture with the North. The remarks also reflected, American experts said, an effort by the Chinese to throw responsibility for what happens back on Washington, after Mr. Trump declared, in several Twitter messages, that it was up to the Chinese to contain their neighbor and sometime partner.
Continue reading the main story Related Coverage In a telephone conversation with Mr. Trump on Wednesday, China’s president, Xi Jinping, also called for restraint. But behind the scenes, officials said, Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi had reached some preliminary understandings, during their meeting at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort a week ago, about what the Chinese might do to change the behavior of the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un.