North Korea warns of nuclear war ‘tipping point’ over US drill

North Korea yesterday lashed out at a live-fire drill by the US and South Korea, accusing Washington of pushing the peninsula to the “tipping point” of nuclear war.

The allies held the rare drill as tensions grew over the peninsula after the North’s first intercontinental ballistic missile test last week.

The test sparked global alarm because it suggested North Korea now had a missile capable of reaching Alaska.

In Saturday’s drill, designed to “sternly respond” to missile launches by the North, two US bombers destroyed “enemy” missile batteries and South Korean jets mounted strikes against underground command posts.

The North’s state-run Rodong newspaper accused Washington and Seoul of increasing tensions with the military exercise, in an editorial titled “Don’t play with fire on a powder keg”.

“The US, with its dangerous military provocation, is pushing the risk of a nuclear war on the peninsula to a tipping point,” it said, calling the peninsula the “world’s biggest tinderbox”.

In Saturday’s drill, long-range B-1B Lancer bombers flew close to the heavily fortified border between the two Koreas and dropped 900-kilogram bombs.

Pyongyang said the drill was a “dangerous military gambit of warmongers who are trying to ignite the fuse of a nuclear war on the peninsula”.

“A small misjudgment or error can immediately lead to the beginning of a nuclear war, which will inevitably lead to another world war,” it said.

Tension has been high as US president Donald Trump and the North’s leader Kim Jongun have for months exchanged hostile speech.

Tension further escalated after North Korea’s missile test on Tuesday, a milestone in Pyongyang’s decades-long quest for weapons capable of reaching the US.

In another exercise held after Tuesday’s test, US and South Korean troops fired ballistic missiles simulating an attack on the North’s leadership “as a strong message of warning”, the South’s military said.

The American missile defence agency said on Friday that it would soon test an anti-ballistic missile system in Alaska.

This is a dangerous military gambit of warmongers who are trying to ignite the fuse of a nuclear war on the peninsula