North Korea’s military on Tuesday presented leader Kim Jong Un with plans to launch missiles into waters near Guam and “wring the windpipes of the Yankees,” even as both Koreas and the United States signalled their willingness to avert a deepening crisis, with each suggesting a path toward negotiations.
The tentative interest in diplomacy follows unusually combative threats between US President Donald Trump and North Korea amid worries that Pyongyang is nearing its long-sought goal of accurately being able to send a nuclear missile to the US mainland. Next week’s start of US-South Korean military exercises that enrage the North each year makes it unclear, however, if diplomacy will prevail.
During an inspection of the North Korean army’s Strategic Forces, which handles the missile programme, Kim praised the military for drawing up a “close and careful plan” and said he would watch the “foolish and stupid conduct of the Yankees” a little more before deciding whether to order the missile test, the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency said. Kim appeared in photos sitting at a table with a large map marked by a straight line between what appeared to be northeastern North Korea and Guam, and passing over Japan - apparently showing the missiles’ flight route.
Lobbing missiles toward Guam, a major US military hub in the Pacific, would be a deeply provocative act from the US perspective, and a miscalculation on either side could lead to a military clash. US Defence Secretary James Mattis said the US would take out any such missile seen to be heading for American soil and declared any such North Korean attack could mean war.
Kim’s comments, however, with their conditional tone, seemed to hold out the possibility that friction could ease if the US made some sort of gesture that Pyongyang considered a move to back away from previous “extremely dangerous reckless actions.”
South Korean President Moon Jae-in, meanwhile, a liberal who favours engagement with the North, urged North Korea to stop provocations and to commit to talks over its nuclear weapons programme.
Moon, in a televised speech Tuesday on the anniversary of the end of World War II and the Korean Peninsula’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule, said that Seoul and Washington agree that the crisis over the North’s nuclear programme should “absolutely be solved peacefully,” and that no US military action on the Korean Peninsula could be taken without Seoul’s consent.
Moon said the North could create conditions for talks by stopping nuclear and missile tests.
North Korea is angry about new UN sanctions over its expanding nuclear weapons and missile programme and the upcoming military drills between Washington and Seoul.
Kim said the US must “make a proper option first and show it through action, as it committed provocations after introducing huge nuclear strategic equipment into the vicinity of the peninsula” and that it “should stop at once arrogant provocations” against North Korea, state media said.