KCNA news agency said North Korea has successfully tested a new indigenously designed engine under the supervision of Kim Jong Un at the Sohae missile launch site near its west coast.
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North Korea said Saturday it has successfully tested the booster capability of a new intercontinental ballistic rocket engine that could give it the power to target the United States with nuclear strikes.
Since North Korea conducted its fifth nuclear test in January, Kim’s regime has crowed about a whole range of technical leaps and bounds, from road-mobile multiple rocket launchers and solid fuel rocket engines to being able to make a nuclear warhead small enough to attach to a missile.
The nation would now have the capacity to “keep any cesspool of shades of malice in the earth including the USA terrain inside of our striking reach”, Mr Kim was cited as saying.
Deployment of a new U.S. missile-defense system to South Korea “is going to happen”, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on Friday, adding that China should do more to counter North Korea’s missile development rather than complain about U.S. plans.
In March, North Korea conducted multiple short and medium-range rocket launches.
Since the peninsula was cut in two in 1953 after the Korean war, around 29,000 people have fled North Korea and arrived in the South where they are given asylum.
“I think the main goal of the upcoming party congress would be to build up Kim Jong-un’s one-man rule… as part of that project, North Korea is beefing up the glorification of Kim Jong-un”, Lim Byeong-cheol, an official within the South Korean Unification Ministry, told Yonhap.
Thirteen North Koreans working at the same restaurant overseas have defected to South Korea.
He pointed to differences in the rocket engines’ shape and size and the way flames come out of them.
The North has gone to great lengths in recent months to tout alleged advancements in its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs.
However, global experts believe the claims to be exaggerated.
NK News, a news website run by North Korean defectors, has more on the military specifics of Pyongyang’s suspected latest attempted missile test.
The threats also coincided with South Korea’s ongoing largest-ever military drills with the United States, which North Korea sees as a rehearsal for an invasion.
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The US has additionally held chats with South Korea went for conveying a US rocket barrier framework to the Korean promontory, a move unequivocally contradicted by North Korea, Russia and China.
