North Korea’s Nuclear Counterattack: State media said on Monday that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un oversaw two days of military exercises “simulating a nuclear response,” including the launch of a ballistic missile.
According to the official Korean Central News Agency, Kim expressed pleasure over the weekend drills, which were held to “enable relevant units get familiar with the procedures and methods for carrying out their tactical nuclear attack missions” (KCNA).
The exercises took place amid Freedom Shield, the largest US-South Korea military exercise in five years, and were Pyongyang’s fourth show of force in a week.
All of these training sessions are seen as invasion drills by North Korea, which has frequently threatened to respond with “overwhelming” force.
North Korean military manoeuvres over the weekend included training for “launching a tactical ballistic missile tipped with a dummy nuclear warhead” and exercises simulating the transition to a nuclear retaliation posture, according to KCNA.
The short-range ballistic missile travelled 500 miles or 800 kilometres before coming down in the East Sea, commonly known as the Sea of Japan, according to the Joint Chiefs of Staff of South Korea on Sunday.
They described it as a “serious provocation” that went against UN sanctions.
According to KCNA, Kim claimed that the weekend exercises had given the North Korean military troops “great confidence”.
He said that North Korea could only achieve its objectives “when the nuclear force is… genuinely capable of waging an assault on the enemy” and that it “cannot actually deter a war with the sheer fact that it is a nuclear weapons state.”
The weekend drills, according to Yang Uk, a researcher at the Asan Institute for Policy Research, showed that North Korea’s nuclear posture was becoming “a little more serious”.
He claimed that it appeared North Korea was attempting to demonstrate that it has sufficient practical nuclear attack capability to put its frontline units through extensive tactical training.
In response to escalating military and nuclear threats from Pyongyang, which has recently carried out a number of prohibited weapons tests, Seoul and Washington have increased defence cooperation.
Also, it has compelled Japan and South Korea to try to resolve old differences and increase their security cooperation.
North Korea conducted its second ICBM test of the year on Thursday, using the Hwasong-17, its biggest and most potent ICBM.
That follows two short-range ballistic missiles on Tuesday and two strategic cruise missiles fired from a submarine last Sunday.
According to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency, the UN Security Council will meet in an emergency session on Monday to discuss the ICBM launch at the request of the United States and Japan.
Leif Easley, a professor at Seoul’s Ewha University, says that we cannot take nuclear statements made by North Korea at face value.
Pictures issued by North Korean official media showed Kim and his young daughter surrounded by uniformed officers witnessing the Missile launch.
“The leader would not be in the field with his daughter, posing with missiles for the cameras, if these shooting drills were practise for actual conflict,” Easley told AFP.
Experts have previously predicted that North Korea would exploit the US-South Korea military exercises as justification for additional missile launches and possibly even a nuclear test.
Moreover, According to Lim Eul-chul, a professor at Kyungnam University’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies, this is making the Korean peninsula “a flashpoint with heightened potential for a nuclear war”.
“Reciprocal physical confrontations may occur as a result of unanticipated circumstances as the intensity of the South Korea-US exercises escalates,” he warned.
Kim recently called for an exponential growth in the development of weapons, including tactical nuclear weapons, and North Korea last year declared itself a “irreversible” nuclear power.
