U.S. pushing peninsula to 'brink of nuclear war': North

North Korea

Published: 26 Jun. 2023, 18:26

U.S. pushing peninsula to 'brink of nuclear war': North

In this photo released by the Korean Central News Agency, North Koreans in Pyongyang participate in a mass anti-U.S. rally on Sunday, which marked the 73rd anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War. The caption on the large poster reads ″All of the mainland United States is within our range,″ referring to the North's intercontinental ballistic missiles. [YONHAP]

North Korea’s Foreign Ministry vowed the regime would bolster its “defensive capabilities” as it claimed South Korea and the United States were "pushing the peninsula toward nuclear war,” Pyongyang’s state media reported Monday.

In a report carried by the state-controlled Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the ministry’s Institute for American Studies blamed Seoul and Washington’s “delusional anti-communist military confrontation” for driving “an extremely unstable situation closer to the brink of a nuclear war.”

The North Korean foreign ministry also claimed the United States is “wantonly encroaching upon the sovereignty and security” of the North more persistently this year.

Pyongyang further warned that a war on the peninsula would “rapidly expand into a world war and a thermonuclear war unprecedented in the world,” and that it would continue to strengthen “its self-defensive capabilities for safeguarding its sovereignty” until the U.S. reverses its “anachronistic hostile policy” toward the North.

The North frequently justifies its illicit weapons programs, including its development of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, by citing hostility with South Korea and the United States.

According to the KCNA, the “Korean people have firmly grasped the strongest absolute weapon to punish the U.S. imperialists and the war deterrence for self-defense which no enemy dare provoke.”

The KCNA said Sunday that Im Chon-il, the regime’s vice foreign minister, expressed “strong” support for Russian leadership in comments to Alexander Matsegora, Moscow’s ambassador to Pyongyang, after the recent armed rebellion by Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the mercenary Wagner Group.

The North has drawn closer to Russia and China, its traditional allies, as its tensions with the United States have risen over the ongoing war in Ukraine and the potential conflict brewing over Taiwan.

The KCNA further reported that 120,000 people participated in mass rallies in Pyongyang denouncing the U.S. “provocation of aggression” the previous day, which marked the 73rd anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War.

The rallies were attended by workers and youth, as well as high-ranking Workers’ Party officials Ri Il-hwan and Pak Thae-song, the KCNA said.

Participants at the anti-U.S. rallies on Sunday shouted slogans that vowed “merciless punishment” to the United States, saying it is their “duty” to settle the score over the war, the KCNA reported.

The Korean War began on June 25, 1950, when North Korea’s founder and then-leader Kim Il Sung ordered the North Korean army, armed with Soviet-supplied tanks and weapons, to invade South Korea.

North Korea has long denied starting the war, instead falsely claiming that hostilities began when South Korea and the United States invaded the North and that the regime was able to fight the allies to a stalemate.

The question of who started the Korean War remained a topic of some controversy until the opening of Soviet archives in the early 1990s, when documents from Moscow’s Foreign Ministry proved Stalin gave Kim his backing in April 1950 to invade the South.

Kim’s grandson, Kim Jong-un, rules North Korea today.

One North Korean defector group in South Korea also marked the start of the war by launching 20 balloons carrying some 200,000 anti-Pyongyang leaflets and 10,000 face masks across the heavily militarized inter-Korean border on Sunday night.

Park Sang-hak, head of the Fighters for a Free North Korea, told Yonhap News Agency that the leaflets contained images of Kim Jong-un’s face accompanied by a caption that reads, “My grandfather attacked the South 73 years ago, when should I?”

BY MICHAEL LEE [lee.junhyuk@joongang.co.kr]