North Korea has expanded propaganda broadcasts in border areas in response to South Korea’s resumption of such broadcasts, a Seoul official said on Monday.
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“The United States and South Korea are continuously and closely having discussions on additional deployment of strategic assets on the Korean peninsula”.
During a photo session with hundreds of participants at the headquarters of the Workers’ Party in Pyongyang, the young ruler lauded them for “glorifying the long-held missions of his predecessors” by successfully carrying out what he said was a hydrogen bomb test? a claim that has become the subject of dispute among outside observers. Separately, a panel of experts on North Korea said existing United Nations sanctions against the reclusive country are going unenforced.
A U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber flies over Osan Air Base in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, Sunday, Jan. 10, 2016.
The ministry said that right after Pyongyang’s nuclear test, Hwang made emergency phone calls with his six-party-talks counterparts, noting that Seoul will make efforts to bring concerted response of the global society via such series of consultations.
North Korea’s military, the backbone of the Kim regime, will be hit hard in particular, he said, noting that Russian crude supplies have been halted since the early 1990s.
Pyongyang on Wednesday carried out its fourth nuclear test, angering the global community and raising tensions with neighbouring South Korea.
Curtis Scaparrotti, head of USA military deployment in South Korea, put his troops on the highest alert possible Monday to deter “any provocation coming from North Korea”, an official from United States Forces Korea said, according to Reuters.
South Korea’s Unification Ministry also took measures Monday to further limit the number of its citizens access the jointly run Kaesong industrial complex where approximately 120 South Korean firms employ over 53,000 North Korean workers.
If China cuts off all fuel supplies, however, there will be total mayhem in North Korea within a week, said Kim Kyoung-sool, a senior researcher at the state-funded Korea Energy Economics Institute.
KCNA said Kim expressed expectation and conviction that the scientists would make “uninterrupted advance and innovation with the same vim and vigour with which they succeeded in the H-bomb test on the principle of giving priority to self-development and thus achieve greater successes in the scientific researches for bolstering up the nuclear deterrent for self-defence”.
“The North Korean military is broadcasting (a loudspeaker campaign toward the South) at multiple locations”, South Korea’s Defense Ministry spokesman Kim Min-seok told reporters.
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“Of course, the top agenda of today’s meeting will be North Korea’s nuclear test”, the source said.
