North Korea’s Kim vows to accelerate military build-up: Report
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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un accused the US and South Korea of making the security situation on the Korean peninsula more dangerous.
PHOTO: REUTERS
SEOUL – North Korean leader Kim Jong Un vowed to beef up Pyongyang’s defence capabilities, citing military modernisation efforts by South Korea and the US pushing the region “to the brink of a nuclear war”, state media reported on June 23.
Pyongyang is under multiple sets of sanctions over its nuclear programme, and the two Koreas remain technically at war because their 1950 to 1953 conflict ended in an armistice rather than a peace treaty.
“Comrade Kim Jong Un, in his concluding speech, reaffirmed the steadfast policy stand of our party and state to beef up the national defence capabilities faster,” the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) quoted him as saying in a dispatch.
The speech was delivered as he presided over a three-day party plenary meeting that wrapped up on June 22, during which senior officials reviewed policy initiatives, KCNA said.
It quoted Kim as saying “the US and the ROK are pushing forward with the ROK’s possession of a nuclear submarine while getting ever more undisguised in their moves towards the reinforcement and modernisation of armed forces in the region”, referring to South Korea by the initials of its official name.
According to KCNA, Kim said such moves were “pushing the situation in the Korean peninsula to the brink of a nuclear war”.
In the face of such developments, it was the “steadfast stand” of the North to accelerate efforts to “further expand and strengthen the powerful and absolutely reliable deterrent for self-defence”, he said.
‘Line of no retreat’
KCNA said the meeting “unanimously recognised that to steadily expand and strengthen the nuclear forces... is the most correct and unique way to actively and confidently cope with the unpredictable international military and political situation”.
It added that the North’s development of a war deterrent “with nuclear technology as a basis” would proceed “at increasing speed”.
Pyongyang has repeatedly declared itself an “irreversible” nuclear state since a 2019 summit between Kim and US President Donald Trump in Hanoi collapsed over the scope of denuclearisation and sanctions relief.
Kim’s powerful sister Kim Yo Jong said earlier in June that the North’s nuclear policy was a “line of no retreat”, reiterating the regime’s position that it has no intention of giving up its nuclear arsenal.
South Korean President Lee Jae Myung said last week that Trump had told him it was time to “pay attention to the North Korea issue”.
He told reporters that he had told Trump at a meeting of the Group of Seven in France that sanctions on the North were “ineffective”.
“I also said that we can no longer deal with the North Korean nuclear issue in the same way we deal with other countries, and President Trump agreed,” Lee said. AFP
