Media speculation linked Pyongyang’s possible satellite launch date to the 70th commemoration of an October 10 Workers’ Party founding. The comments fit a pattern of saber rattling by the authorities in Pyongyang before the celebration of such milestones.
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The activities could be part of work to produce new nuclear material that would be a step toward adding to the country’s nuclear stockpile, 38 North said last week.
North Korea, an autocracy run by the same family since 1948, closely controls information about its nuclear program, which it describes as a sovereign right meant to combat USA military hostility. Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected to discuss the North Korean nuclear threat when he meets with U.S. President Barack Obama later this month in Washington. But the talks collapsed six years ago and have not been restarted.
“We hope the relevant parties, under the current circumstances, can do more that is beneficial to safeguarding the peace and stability of the region and the peninsula”, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said in Beijing.
This December 2012 photo, released by North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency, shows North Korea’s Unha-3 rocket being fired from the Sohae Satellite Launching Station in Cholsan, North Pyongan Province.
Analysts believe Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, lost a significant amount of face after backing down at the height of the crisis and he is attempting to once again assert his position. After several failures, it put its first satellite into space with a long-range rocket launched in late 2012. Yet, the country has still pushed forward with missile and nuclear programs despite worldwide warnings and sanctions. Uranium, if highly enriched, provides a second track to developing nuclear bombs in addition to the country’s existing stockpile of plutonium.
The rogue communist state says its main nuclear arms complex is now fully operational and that it has the capability to launch rockets against Britain and America. It didn’t give any time frame for a launch.
Its spokesman Kim Min-seok said: “North Korea’s ballistic missile launch is a serious provocation and a military threat as well”.
“Ground-based interceptors to Alaska, surface combatants to the Western Pacific, a THAAD battery on Guam, another radar in Japan in order to be ready and vigilant for anything the North Koreans may or may not do”, the US ambassador to South Korea told CNN on Tuesday.
The north Korea is designing its nuclear weapons “in quality and quantity”, as report given to KCNA Agency.
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The two Koreas in August threatened each other with war in the he wake of mine explosions blamed on Pyongyang that maimed two South Korean soldiers earlier in that month.
