‘KIM’ AND GET IT!
US, allies’ bomb threat vs. NK
The United States and allies Japan and South Korea flew fighter jets and bombers over the Korean Peninsula in a show of force against President Kim Jong-un’s regime, the US military said on Monday.
Soon after the exercise was disclosed, the White House said President Trump spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping about North Korea’s escalating weapons program and the two agreed on “maximizing pressure” on the rogue nation “through vigorous enforcement of United Nations Security Council resolutions.”
Air Force and Marine Corps warplanes — including B-1B bombers and F-35 jets — released live weapons during the Sunday drill at a training area, the US Pacific Command said.
“US Pacific Command maintains the ability to respond to any threat in the Indo-Asia-Pacific theater at a moment’s notice,” the US military said in the statement.
The operation was in response to North Korea firing a missile last Friday that sailed over Japan and crashed 2,300 miles away in the Pacific Ocean — the second time in a month that Pyongyang has fired an ICBM over the island nation.
Kim’s government also successfully detonated a nuclear device earlier this month.
Meanwhile, Russian and Chinese naval forces conducted drills near Russia’s border with North Korea, Reuters reported Monday.
Citing China’s Xinhua news agency, it said the drills are the second part of joint Moscow-Beijing naval exercises this year that began in the Baltic in July.
Xinhua did not link the exercises to escalating tensions on the Korean Peninsula.
Trump on Sunday mocked Kim as the “Rocket Man” in a tweet as the US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, warned North Korea it would be wiped out if the US is attacked.
“We wanted to be responsible and go through all diplomatic means to get their attention first. If that doesn’t work, General [James] Mattis will take care of it,” Haley said on CNN, referring to the defense secretary.
“If North Korea keeps on with this reckless behavior, the United States has to defend itself or defend its allies in any way, North Korea will be destroyed, and we know that and none of us want that. None of us want war,” she added.
In his tweet, Trump also suggested that UN sanctions against Kim’s regime were working, saying “long gas lines were forming in North Korea. Too bad!”
Pyongyang on Monday called the new restrictions on oil and textile imports “vicious, unethical and inhumane.”
“The increased moves of the US and its vassal forces to impose sanctions and pressure . . . will only increase our pace toward the ultimate completion of the state nuclear force,” North Korea’s Foreign Ministry spokesman said in a statement published in state-run media.