The missiles fired yesterday flew about 500 kilometers off its east coast city of Wonsan and were likely from the Soviet-developed Scud series, South Korea’s defense ministry said.
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Pyongyang has warned it would make a “preemptive and offensive nuclear strike” in response to the exercises.
Meanwhile, Hong Kong has turned away a North Korean freighter seeking to dock following new United Nations sanctions over Pyongyang’s nuclear test and rocket launch, the government said Thursday.
It is located to the north of the demilitarized zone separating the Korean Peninsula in two parts since the signing of an armistice agreement after the 1950-1953 war.
It warned of “indiscriminate” nuclear attacks against the US and South Korea in response to “even the slightest military action”. The plant is capable of making weapons-grade plutonium at a level that would allow it to make one nuclear bomb per year. Observers said it could move the remaining manufacturing equipment at Kaesong to other industrial areas or convert it to military use, and use the South Korean-owned facilities at Diamond Mountain for its own tourism project.
Pyongyang has stepped up its bellicose rhetoric and its displays of military might since the adaptation of new global sanctions against the country, following its fourth nuclear test on January 6 and the launch of a space rocket on February 7, which many consider a disguised ballistic missile test.
Freeman also said diplomatic initiatives to pressure North Korea to abandon its nuclear program had failed because they did not offer any positive incentive for Pyongyang to change its policies.
South Korea protested the move as “totally unacceptable” but did not say what it could do to recover the assets that it valued in excess of 1.4 trillion won (HK$9.06 billion).
While overseeing a ballistic missile launch on Thursday, March 10 Kim stressed the importance of conducting “more nuclear explosion tests to estimate the destructive power of the newly produced nuclear warheads ” , the North’s official KCNA news agency said”. Since then, the North has launched a long-range rocket and the South has shut a jointly run factory park, slapped sanctions on the North, and begun large-scale war games with the United States. North Korea hates the annual military drills staged by Seoul and Washington, calling them preparations for an invasion.
During the visit, he stated that his scientists had mastered the process of shrinking warheads to a size capable of fitting on a ballistic missile – a step that would present a heightened threat to South Korea, other countries in the region and, eventually, the U.S. mainland.
South Korea’s foreign ministry said Thursday’s missile launches again violated a series of UN Security Council resolutions and it would refer the matter to the Council sanctions committee mandated to enforce the resolutions. The picture has not been independently verified by experts and is not dated.
A spokesman said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was “gravely concerned” and called on North Korea to cease destabilizing acts like the missile launch.
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The Pentagon said this week it had not seen North Korea demonstrate a capability to miniaturise a nuclear warhead.
