N Korea threatens new bomb test
SOUTH KOREA: North Korea said yesterday it might test a hydrogen bomb on the Pacific Ocean after United States President Donald Trump vowed to destroy the country, with leader Kim Jong-un promising to make a ‘‘mentally deranged’’ Trump pay dearly for his threats.
Kim, who has traded ever-more heightened rhetoric with Trump, did not specify what his response would be. His comments were believed to be the first direct message ever issued by a North Korean leader.
However, Kim’s foreign minister, Ri Yong-ho, said North Korea could consider a hydrogen bomb test of an unprecedented scale on the Pacific Ocean, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported.
Ri, who was talking to reporters in New York ahead of a planned address later this week, also said he did not know Kim’s exact thoughts, according to the report.
Japan, the only country ever to suffer an atomic attack, described the threat as ‘‘totally unacceptable’’.
Trump said in his first address to the United Nations on Wednesday that he would ‘‘totally destroy’’ North Korea if it threatened the US and its allies, and called Kim a ‘‘rocket man’’ on a suicide mission.
Kim said the North would consider the ‘‘highest level of hardline countermeasure in history’’ against the US, and that Trump’s comments had confirmed that his own nuclear programme was ‘‘the correct path’’.
Pyongyang conducted its sixth and largest nuclear test on September 3 and has launched dozens of missiles this year as it accelerates a programme aimed at enabling it to target the US with a nuclear-tipped missile.
‘‘I will surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged US dotard with fire,’’ Kim said in the statement carried by the KCNA state news agency, referring to Trump.
Vipin Narang, an associate professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said he could not recall such a statement in the first person, authored and signed by Kim.
The escalating rhetoric came even as UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for statesmanship to avoid ‘‘sleepwalking’’ into a war. South Korea, Russia and China all urged calm.
However, the rhetoric was starting to rattle some in the international community. French Sports Minister Laura Flessel said France’s team would not travel to the 2018 Winter Olympic Games in South Korea if its security could not be guaranteed. The games are to be staged in Pyeongchang, just 80 kilometres from the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea.
In a sanctions announcement yesterday, Trump stopped short of going after Pyongyang’s biggest trading partner, China, praising as ‘‘tremendous’’ a move by its central bank ordering Chinese banks to stop doing business with North Korea.
Trump said the new executive order on sanctions gave further authorities to target individual companies and institutions that financed and facilitated trade with North Korea.
It would ‘‘cut off sources of revenue that fund North Korea’s efforts to develop the deadliest weapons known to humankind’’, Trump said.
US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said banks doing business in North Korea would not be allowed to also operate in the US.
The UN Security Council has unanimously imposed nine rounds of sanctions on North Korea since 2006, the latest this month capping fuel supplies to the isolated state.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who addressed the UN General Assembly, said sanctions were needed to bring Pyongyang to the negotiating table, but Seoul was not seeking North Korea’s collapse.
‘‘All of our endeavours are to prevent war from breaking out and maintain peace,’’ Moon said in his speech. He warned that the nuclear issue had to be managed stably so that ‘‘accidental military clashes will not destroy peace’’.
- Reuters