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
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