Category: North Korea

It really is only a question of how big of a provocation the North Koreans are prepared to launch later this week:

North Korea has ignored U.S. offers for talks and may be preparing a nuclear test to celebrate the birth of the nation’s founder, according to the U.S. State Department.

Pyongyang could test a nuclear weapon April 15, when the North will mark the 110th birthday of late leader Kim Il Sung, the U.S. Special Representative for North Korea Policy, Sung Kim, told reporters Wednesday.

“I don’t want to speculate too much, but I think it could be another missile launch. It could be a nuclear test,” he said, according to a Thursday report by The Korea Times.

Stars & Stripes

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In North Korea they have no issue with arbitrarily killing people so of course they would support Russia doing the same thing against Ukrainians:

North Korea on Saturday condemned the United States for making the crisis surrounding Ukraine a human rights issue and imposing sanctions against Russia, denouncing U.S. President Joe Biden as “an old man in his senility” and a man of a “repeated slip of tongue.”

A commentary carried by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said the Ukraine issue has suddenly become a human rights issue, as the U.S. and western media branded the case as a war crime, with a politically motivated plot to defame Russia and to achieve the collapse of its regime.

“The latest story is the U.S. chief executive who spoke ill of the Russian president with groundless data,” the English-language article read. “Such reckless remarks can be made only by the descendants of Yankees, master hand at aggression and plot-breeding.”

The North then called Biden “an old man in his senility” with “a problem in his intellectual faculty,” and “the president known for his repeated slip of tongue,” though it stopped short of putting Biden’s name in the article.

“A big question is if he could ever have done anything right with such IQ during his florid 50-year political career,” according to the commentary.

Yonhap

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Hard to believe anything that comes from the Kim regime when these are the people that can invent the flimsiest of excuses to launch provocations:

 The sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said South Korea is no match for her nuclear-armed country, as she reiterated Pyongyang’s position that Seoul is not a “principal enemy,” according to state media Tuesday.

Kim Yo-jong again took issue with the South Korean defense chief’s talk in public last week of his troops’ “preemptive strike” capabilities, boasting repeatedly about Pyongyang’s nuclear combat force.

Kim, vice department director of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea who is known to be in charge of inter-Korean affairs, described the minister’s remarks as an “irretrievable very big mistake.” 

“If anyone does not provoke us, we will never strike it before anything else,” she said in her second press statement in two days carried by the Korean Central News Agency.

“We will not fire even a single bullet or shell toward South Korea. It is because we do not regard it as match for our armed forces,” Kim added, emphasizing once again that the North is a nuclear weapons state. 

“In other words, it means that unless the South Korean army takes any military action against our state, it will not be regarded as a target of our attack,” she said.

Yonhap

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It looks like Kim Jong-un may be trying to welcome incoming ROK President Yoon Suk-yeol with a nuclear test:

South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency reported Sunday that North Korea, according to government sources, was working on developing a pathway to an underground tunnel at the test site that was supposedly demolished by North Korea during the inter-Korea peace talks in 2018.

Commercial satellite images previously indicated that North Korea was repairingand building at the site, according to analysts from the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.

“One possibility is that North Korea plans to bring the test site back to a state of readiness to resume nuclear explosive testing,” Jeffrey Lewis, director of the center’s East Asia Nonproliferation Program, and Dave Schmerler, a senior research associate, wrote in a report published March 7.

North Korea’s public statements and mounting evidence of renovations at its nuclear test site suggest a nuclear test on the horizon, the regime’s first since Sept. 3, 2017, when it claimed to have successfully tested a hydrogen bomb.

Stars & Stripes

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It appears that since the North Koreans failed in the launch of their new ICBM they decided to fire off their older ICBM and claim it was the new one:

 South Korea and the United States regard North Korea as having disguised its launch of an existing intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) last week as that of a new larger one, informed sources said Sunday.

The allies believe that the North again tested a Hwasong-15 ICBM on Thursday, the same type it fired in late 2017, according to the sources. The North has publicly claimed success in the launch of a Hwasong-17 missile.

Their intelligence analysis suggested that like the Hwasong-15, the ICBM in question had two engine nozzles, whereas the Hwasong-17 has four nozzles. The engine combustion time of the first-stage rocket was also similar to that of the Hwasong-15.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.