“It shows that they can attack Port of Busan and Kwangyang, the two South Korean ports that are being used for transporting and stockpiling the US military’s war supplies”, Kim Min-seok, a senior researcher at the Korea Defense and Security Forum told NK News.
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North Korea has boasted about the successful completion of its latest ballistic missile test which demonstrated Pyongyang’s capability to launch a pre-emptive strike on South Korea’s ports and airfields hosting the “US imperialists’ nuclear war hardware”.
North Korea said Wednesday that its the day before conducted simulations of nuclear strikes against American military targets in South Korea, the official news agency KCNA North Korean.
North Korea’s Workers’ Party newspaper Rodong Sinmun also ran eight photographs of Kim Jong Un allegedly providing field guidance to the KPA. Neither report mentioned the date of the drill. Seoul and Washington have agreed to deploy the system, known as Thaad-for Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense-before the end of 2017 to better protect the South from North Korean missiles.
North Korea fired three ballistic missiles off its eastern coast on Tuesday morning, according to the South Korean military. “And we’re going to continue to apply pressure and we’re going to continue to call on North Korea to stop its provocative actions and respond to the global community’s concerns”, he said.
Due to previous nuclear and missile tests conducted by North Korea, the United States and China had blocked the nations shipping earlier this year.
The United States expressed concern for Tuesday’s test firing, saying the launches and other recent tests violated U.N. sanctions forbidding any tests of nuclear or ballistic technology.
The missiles were launched between 5:45am and 6:40am local time from the Hwangju region in the western part of North Korea.
“But China is not foolish enough to alienate itself from South Korea to take sides with North Korea”.
But North Korea has continued to pump out statements that increase tension on the peninsula, where the two sides remain technically at war, more than 60 years after the Korean war. The U.S. maintains about 28,500 servicemembers in the South. There are almost 30,00 USA troops permanently stationed in South Korea. Pyongyang’s KCNA news agency announced that the launch was a dry run for South Korean ports and air bases hosting USA military “hardware” Al Jazeera reports.
Unable to assuage the concerns, South Korean and USA officials made a decision to try putting a friendly face on the system.
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It claimed the flight was “timed to coincide with the US official decision to deploy THAAD in South Korea”.
