A defiant Kim Jong-Un seemingly taunted the United States after a successful test of the intercontinental ballistic missile he said was ‘a gift for American bastards on July 4.’
The North Korean leader made the haughty statement after the ICBM was launched Tuesday, the Korean Central News Agency reported. But the U.S. quickly responded along with South Korea by conducting a joint ballistic missile drill.
South Korea says the response was ‘intended as a strong warning against North Korean provocation.’
‘Eighth U.S. Army and Republic of Korea (ROK) military personnel conducted a combined event exercising assets countering North Korea’s destabilizing and unlawful actions on July 4,’ a statement from US and South Koran officials reads.
‘This exercise utilized the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) and the Republic of Korea Hyunmoo Missile II, which fired missiles into territorial waters of South Korea along the East Coast.
‘The system can be rapidly deployed and engaged. The deep strike precision capability enables the ROK-U.S. Alliance to engage the full array of time critical targets under all weather conditions.’
The statement adds that South Korea and the U.S. are ‘committed to peace and prosperity on the Koran Peninsula and throughout the Asia-Pacific.
‘The U.S. commitment to the defense of the ROK in the face of threats is ironclad.’
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson confirmed that North Korea successfully tested an ICBM capable of hitting Alaska and that’s a new escalation of the threat posed to the United States and the world by North Korea.
Tillerson said the U.S. will bring North Korea’s action before the United Nations Security Council.
His statement provided the first confirmation of the U.S. conclusion that the missile was an ICBM.
The U.S. military’s initial assessment was that North Korea fired an intermediate-range missile.
The U.S. has requested a closed-door meeting of the United Nations Security Council on the latest launch, a spokesman for the US mission to the United Nations says.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres strongly condemned the missile test.
‘This action is yet another brazen violation of Security Council resolutions and constitutes a dangerous escalation of the situation,’ Guterres said through his spokesman according to CNN.
‘The DPRK leadership must cease further provocative actions and comply fully with its international obligations.’
The spokesman said the meeting of the 15-member council was likely to be scheduled for Wednesday.
North Korea’s Academy of Defense Science claimed the test marked the ‘final step’ in creating a ‘confident and powerful nuclear state that can strike anywhere on Earth’.
The US ‘attempts to test our determination and ignores our warnings’, the state-run Korea Central News Agency cited Kim as saying.
Breaking into laughter, the news agency said, the leader ‘added that we should send them gifts once in a while to help break their boredom’.
The North Korean leader also said the missile looked ‘as handsome as a good-looking boy’ and that the country would not negotiate with America to give up its weapons program until Washington abandoned its hostile policy against the North.
The launch in North Korea, which came as the United States prepared to mark its Independence Day, triggered a Twitter outburst from President Donald Trump who urged China to ‘put a heavy move’ on North Korea to ‘end this nonsense once and for all’.
North Korea has long sought to build a rocket capable of delivering an atomic warhead to the continental United States – something that Trump has vowed ‘won’t happen’, and launch marks a new phase in the country’s decades-long weapons program.
Trump called an emergency meeting on the Fourth of July to formulate a ‘measured response’ to North Korea’s first intercontinental ballistic missile test, amid fears it could reach as far as Alaska.
Officials say Trump would potentially approve a ‘measured response’ to deal with North Korea.
Potential responses include sending additional troops to the region and possibly more sanctions.
On Tuesday, the US, Japan, and South Korea said intelligence suggested the missile flew for about 40 minutes and reached an altitude of 1,500 miles, which would be longer and higher than any similar North Korean test previously reported. It also covered a distance of about 580 miles.
In the wake of the test, David Wright, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote on the organisation’s allthingsnuclear blog that the available figures implied the missile ‘could reach a maximum range of roughly 6,700km on a standard trajectory’.
‘That range would not be enough to reach the lower 48 states or the large islands of Hawaii, but would allow it to reach all of Alaska.’
The missile launch prompted control specialist Jeffrey Lewis to respond on Twitter: ‘That’s it. It’s an ICBM. An ICBM that can hit Anchorage not San Francisco, but still.’
The launch seems designed to send a political warning to Washington and its chief Asian allies, Seoul and Tokyo, even as it allows North Korean scientists a chance to perfect their still-incomplete nuclear missile program.
When it announced the missile test earlier, North Korean officials called the launch, which leader Kim Jong-un supervised, a ‘glistening miracle’.
The ‘landmark’ test of a Hwasong-14 missile was overseen by Kim, an emotional female announcer said on state Korean Central Television.
The test-fire was conducted at the highest angle and did not have any negative impact on the safety of neighboring countries,’ announcer Ri Chun-Hee, who previously told her loyal viewers of the deaths of the country’s founder Kim Il-Sung and his son Kim Jong-Il, said.
‘As the dignified nuclear power who possesses the strongest intercontinental ballistic rocket which is capable of hitting any part of the world along with the nuclear weapons, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) will fundamentally terminate the US nuclear war threats and blackmail and credibly protect the peace and stability of the Korean Peninsula and the region,’ she added.
‘Kim Jong Un, Supreme Leader of our party, state and the army, personally observed the process of the test-launch in field and solemnly declared before the world its shining success,’ the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said in an accompanying article.
Daily Mail
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