AP, Seoul
The powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ripped South Korea for proceeding with military exercises with the United States she claimed are an invasion rehearsal and warned Tuesday that the North will work faster to strengthen its preemptive strike capabilities.
Kim Yo Jong’s statement came after South Korean media reported the allied militaries will begin four days of preliminary training on Tuesday before holding computer-simulated drills on Aug. 16-26.
Kim said she was delegated authority to release the statement, implying the message came directly from her brother.
She described the South’s decision to hold joint exercises despite earlier warnings by the North as “perfidious behavior” that will push the allies into facing a “more serious security threat.”
She said continuing the drills exposed the hypocrisy of the Biden administration’s offers to resume dialogue over the North’s nuclear weapons program. She said there won’t be stabilized peace on the Korean Peninsula unless the United States withdraws its troops and weapons in the South.
Kim said the North will “put more spur to further increasing the deterrent of absolute capacity to cope with the ever-growing military threats from the US,” including its capabilities for national defense and “powerful” preemptive strikes for “rapidly countering any military actions against us.”
“(The drills) are the most vivid expression of the US hostile policy towards the DPRK, designed to stifle our state by force, and an unwelcoming act of self-destruction for which a dear price should be paid as they threaten the safety of our people and further imperil the situation on the Korean Peninsula,” Kim said, using the initials of the country’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
“For peace to settle on the peninsula, it is imperative for the US to withdraw its aggression troops and war hardware deployed in (South) Korea. As long as the US forces stay in (South) Korea, the root cause for the periodic aggravation of the situation on the Korean Peninsula will never vanish.”
It wasn’t immediately clear whether North Korea’s threat to advance its preemptive strike capabilities signaled a resumption of testing activity.
The North ended a yearlong pause in ballistic tests in March by firing two short-range missiles into the sea, continuing a tradition of testing new US administrations with weapons demonstrations and other provocations apparently aimed at measuring Washington’s response and wresting concessions.
But the North hasn’t conducted any known test launches since then as Kim Jong Un focused national efforts on fending off Covid-19 and salvaging a broken economy damaged further by pandemic border closures.
