North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s powerful sister, Kim Yo-jong, yesterday said that a US-South Korean agreement aimed at strengthening deterrence against Pyongyang would lead to “more serious danger,” state media reported.
The US and South Korea this week vowed that North Korea would face a nuclear response and the “end” of the leadership there should it use its own nuclear weapons against the allies, as the two countries’ presidents met in Washington.
In Pyongyang’s first response to the Washington summit, Kim Yo-jong said that the North remained convinced that its nuclear deterrent “should be brought to further perfection.”
Photo: Korean Central News Agency / Korea News Service via AP
“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-defense will become,” the North’s Korean Central News Agency quoted her as saying.
South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and US President Joe Biden on Wednesday issued the Washington Declaration, bolstering the US nuclear umbrella over South Korea, which is increasingly nervous about Pyongyang’s aggression.
It will involve the “regular deployment of strategic assets” including the first South Korean port visit by a nuclear ballistic submarine in decades, a US official said.
However, the agreement would “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,” Kim Yo-jong said.
North Korea has defied years of sanctions to continue work on its banned nuclear and missile programs, and last year declared itself an “irreversible” nuclear power, effectively ending the possibility of denuclearization talks.
Pyongyang has conducted a record-breaking string of sanctions-defying launches this year, including test-firing the country’s first solid-fuel ballistic missile — a key technical breakthrough for Kim Jong-un’s military.
Washington and Seoul have ramped up defense cooperation in response, staging joint military exercises with advanced stealth jets and high-profile US strategic assets.
Biden’s criticism of the North is “nonsensical ... from the person in his dotage,” Kim Yo-jong said.
In a further swipe at the 80-year-old Biden’s age, she said that he was “not at all capable of taking the responsibility ... an old man with no future.”
She added it was “too much for him to serve out the two-year remainder of his office term,” before then calling Yoon a “fool.”
Seoul condemned Kim Yo-jong’s “far-fetched” statement.
It “reflects its nervousness and frustration at the drastically strengthened nuclear deterrence of the [South] Korea-US alliance,” the South Korean Ministry of Unification said.
The ministry, which is in charge of inter-Korean relations, added that the statement’s “rude language” demonstrated “the North’s lowly level.”
On Friday, Yoon gave a speech and took questions at the Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he spoke about the challenges facing his country.
“If we were to accept nuclear weapons by North Korea, then South Korea may have to possess nuclear weapons,” he said during a question-and-answer period after his speech. “This is not something we want to see happen.”
Yoon went on to say that if North Korea were to use nuclear weapons “the result is quite obvious.”
Additional reporting by AP
STILL COMMITTED: The US opposes any forced change to the ‘status quo’ in the Strait, but also does not seek conflict, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said US President Donald Trump’s administration released US$5.3 billion in previously frozen foreign aid, including US$870 million in security exemptions for programs in Taiwan, a list of exemptions reviewed by Reuters showed. Trump ordered a 90-day pause on foreign aid shortly after taking office on Jan. 20, halting funding for everything from programs that fight starvation and deadly diseases to providing shelters for millions of displaced people across the globe. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has said that all foreign assistance must align with Trump’s “America First” priorities, issued waivers late last month on military aid to Israel and Egypt, the
France’s nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and accompanying warships were in the Philippines yesterday after holding combat drills with Philippine forces in the disputed South China Sea in a show of firepower that would likely antagonize China. The Charles de Gaulle on Friday docked at Subic Bay, a former US naval base northwest of Manila, for a break after more than two months of deployment in the Indo-Pacific region. The French carrier engaged with security allies for contingency readiness and to promote regional security, including with Philippine forces, navy ships and fighter jets. They held anti-submarine warfare drills and aerial combat training on Friday in
COMBAT READINESS: The military is reviewing weaponry, personnel resources, and mobilization and recovery forces to adjust defense strategies, the defense minister said The military has released a photograph of Minister of National Defense Wellington Koo (顧立雄) appearing to sit beside a US general during the annual Han Kuang military exercises on Friday last week in a historic first. In the photo, Koo, who was presiding over the drills with high-level officers, appears to be sitting next to US Marine Corps Major General Jay Bargeron, the director of strategic planning and policy of the US Indo-Pacific Command, although only Bargeron’s name tag is visible in the seat as “J5 Maj General.” It is the first time the military has released a photo of an active
CHANGE OF MIND: The Chinese crew at first showed a willingness to cooperate, but later regretted that when the ship arrived at the port and refused to enter Togolese Republic-registered Chinese freighter Hong Tai (宏泰號) and its crew have been detained on suspicion of deliberately damaging a submarine cable connecting Taiwan proper and Penghu County, the Coast Guard Administration said in a statement yesterday. The case would be subject to a “national security-level investigation” by the Tainan District Prosecutors’ Office, it added. The administration said that it had been monitoring the ship since 7:10pm on Saturday when it appeared to be loitering in waters about 6 nautical miles (11km) northwest of Tainan’s Chiang Chun Fishing Port, adding that the ship’s location was about 0.5 nautical miles north of the No.
RSS