Most recently, it tested a nuclear device in January and fired a long-range rocket in February, prompting the UN Security Council to impose its strictest sanctions ever on the secretive state.
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America and South Korea are now engaged in major joint military exercises with each other and the United States has 30,000 troops stationed in the south. John Fisher of Human Rights Watch said that North Korea had “horrific” forced labour camps, public executions and a history of mass malnutrition and even “mass starvation”.
The pledge came as the Hermit Kingdom’s leader Kim Jong-un said his country would soon conduct more nuclear warhead and missile tests, official media said yesterday.
The report asserted that North Korean scientists had succeeded in miniaturizing a nuclear warhead, allowing it to be placed on long-range ballistic missiles.
Meeting with her cabinet ministers on Tuesday, South Korean President Park Geun-Hye said North Korea’s endless threats reflected a “sense of crisis” in Pyongyang at its increasing diplomatic and economic isolation.
If Pyongyang continues unreasonable provocations and strong confrontations with the worldwide community while refraining from coming to a path of change, it will walk a path of destroying itself, Xinhua news agency quoted Park as saying. There are also many doubts that Jong Un’s military has the ability to launch an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile capable of hitting the western portion of the United States, let alone Washington D.C. South Korea, though, is in range.
Protected by “newly developed heat-resisting material”, the warhead was reportedly subjected to thermal flows five times hotter than those associated with ICBM flight.
“For now, though, it looks like a nuclear test and several missile tests in close succession”, he said. “What North Korea announced today was North Korea’s one-sided claim”, Moon Sang-gyun, the ministry spokesman said according to Reuters.
“It would be extremely risky and destabilizing if they tested a nuclear-armed KN-08 missile…I’m not sure North Korea’s neighbors could distinguish a “test” from an ‘attack, ‘” Ms. Hanham said.
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South Korea’s defence ministry said after the North’s report that it still does not believe the North has acquired missile re-entry technology. He instructed a team to be “vigilant in preparation”, adding that significant progress has been made in the area of ballistic rockets, although there is no direct evidence North Korea has mastered re-entry technology that could send a bomb back into the atmosphere.
