Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Kim, Trump trade insults
NEW YORK — President Donald Trump lashed back Friday at North Korea’s leader, calling Kim Jong Un a “madman” whose regime will be “tested like never before” with the implementation of new U.S.-imposed financial sanctions.
Kim earlier Friday had called Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard” and warned that he will “pay dearly” for his threat to “totally destroy” the North if it attacks.
In response, Trump tweeted that Kim is “obviously a madman who doesn’t mind starving or killing his people.”
The U.S. sanctions, announced Thursday, expanded the Treasury Department’s ability to target anyone conducting significant trade in goods, services or technology with North Korea and to ban them from interacting with the U.S. financial system.
The Trump administration has sought to build international support for more aggressively confronting the rogue nation, whose escalating nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities have reached what U.S. officials consider a crisis point.
Kim said in his statement early Friday that if the U.S. were to carry out its threat to destroy the North, his country would consider the “highest level of hard-line countermeasure in history.” His foreign minister, asked while in New York for the U.N. General Assembly what the countermeasure would be, said his country may test a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific Ocean.
“I think it could be the most powerful detonation of an H-bomb in the Pacific,” Ri Yong Ho said, according to South Korean TV. “We have no idea about what actions could be taken as it will be ordered by leader Kim Jong Un.”
North Korea has often issued statements in the names of its government and its People’s Army, and since taking power in late 2011, Kim has delivered an annual New Year’s Day speech. But Kim’s Friday statement was the first by Kim directed openly at a foreign head of state. Kim’s father and grandfather, who ruled North Korea before him, never made such a statement, South Korean officials said.
A hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific, if realized, would be considered a major provocation by Washington and its allies. North Korea has conducted six nuclear test explosions since 2006, all at its northeastern underground test site.
Susan Thornton, acting assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, told reporters that such a weapons test would be “outrageous” and would draw a “concerted and determined international response.”
Thornton declined, however, to specify what the U.S. would do. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who said Friday that Kim is “being tested” by the strongest sanctions ever put in place by the U.S. and the international community, also declined to describe a U.S. response.
Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera noted that a Pacific test could mean a nuclear-armed missile flying over Japan. He said North Korea might conduct a hydrogen bomb test with a medium-range or intercontinental ballistic missile, given its recent advances in missile and nuclear weapons development.
“We cannot deny the possibility it may fly over our country,” he said.
It has been 37 years since any nation tested a nuclear weapon in the planet’s atmosphere, reflecting the nearly universal opposition to such tests over fears of the effects of radioactive fallout on human health and the environment. The last atmospheric test took place in 1980, when China fired what experts believed to be a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile into a desert salt flat more than 1,300 miles west of Beijing.
Shin Beom-chul, a security expert at the government-run Korea National Diplomatic Academy in Seoul, said that even if North Korea wanted to conduct an atmospheric nuclear test in the Pacific, it did not have the ability to dispatch test-monitoring ships to the open ocean while the U.S. military was on the prowl.
Shin said North Korea probably would not risk the radioactive fallout and other dangers involved in a nuclear missile test. The country has yet to master the technologies needed to prevent the warhead at the tip of its long-range ballistic missile from burning up while re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, South Korean officials said.
“What if the nuclear missile goes wrong midflight and detonates over Japan? It would mean a nuclear war,” Shin said. “More likely, North Korea will graduate its provocations, as if moving on steppingstones.”
Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., said earlier in the week that the United States needs to launch a pre-emptive strike against North Korea in order to prevent the rogue nation from harming the U.S. first.
“You could assume, right now, that we have a nuclear missile aimed at the United States, and here in San Diego. Why would they not aim here, at Hawaii, Guam, our major naval bases?” Hunter, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said Thursday on San Diego’s KUSI-TV.
“The question is, do you wait for one of those? Or, two? Do you pre-emptively strike them? And that’s what the president has to wrestle with. I would pre-emptively strike them. You could call it declaring war, call it whatever you want,” Hunter continued.
The North Korea issue also involves China, with which the North shares a border as well as nearly 90 percent of its trade.
On Thursday, Trump said Chinese President Xi Jinping had ordered Chinese banks to cease conducting business with North Korean entities. Praising Xi, he called the move “very bold” and “somewhat unexpected.”
But on Friday, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman denied that Beijing had agreed to go that far.
“As far as I know, what you have mentioned just now is not consistent with the facts,” spokesman Lu Kang said at a regular news conference.
Experts said Chinese banks had been told not to let North Korean individuals or companies open new accounts.
At the news conference, Lu repeated Beijing’s familiar talking points: that China “comprehensively and strictly” implements U.N. resolutions but opposes unilateral sanctions imposed outside the U.N. framework.
“China’s stance on this is clear and consistent,” he said.
North Korea was slapped with stiffer sanctions by the United Nations after its sixth and most powerful nuclear test Sept. 3. In recent months, it also has launched a pair of still-developmental intercontinental ballistic missiles it said were capable of striking the continental United States and two intermediate-range missiles that soared over Japanese territory.
North Korea says it needs to have a nuclear deterrent because the United States intends to invade it. Analysts say the North is likely to soon achieve its objective of possessing nuclear missiles capable of reaching any part of the U.S. homeland.
In the U.N. General Assembly speech to which Kim responded Friday, Trump mocked Kim as “rocket man” on a “suicide mission” and said that if “forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”
Kim said Trump’s remarks “have convinced me, rather than frightening or stopping me, that the path I chose is correct and that it is the one I have to follow to the last.”