North Korea renews Guam threat ahead of joint naval exercise

It issues warning to U.S., S. Korea

SEOUL, South Korea — As the United States and South Korea prepare for next week’s joint naval exercise, North Korean officials on Friday renewed their threat to launch ballistic missiles near Guam, an American territory in the western Pacific.

The drill, which involves the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan, is scheduled to begin Monday in waters east and west of South Korea. The 10-day exercise will check the allies’ “communications, interoperability and partnership,” the United States Navy’s 7th Fleet said in a statement.

The nuclear-powered submarine Michigan arrived at the South Korean port of Busan on Friday. American and South Korean warplanes will also join the exercise, which takes place during heightened tensions over North Korea’s advancing nuclear missile program.

In recent months, President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un have amplified the military standoff by exchanging bellicose statements and personal insults.

Although both South Korea and the United States insist next week’s drill is defensive in nature, North Korea considers such war games rehearsals for invasion.

It remains unclear whether North Korea will lash out with a weapons test during the exercise, as it often has in the past.

On Friday, a researcher at the Institute for American Studies at the North Korean Foreign Ministry warned that the joint exercise, as well as a flight by two American B-1B bombers over South Korea on Tuesday, would compel the North to “take military counteraction.”

The researcher, Kim Kwang-hak, did not elaborate but recalled North Korea’s warning in August that it could launch missiles near Guam, home to the United States air base from which the B-1B longrange bombers took off on Tuesday. Kim Jong Un has said he would watch the Americans before deciding when to launch an “enveloping fire” around Guam.

“We have already warned several times that we will take counteractions for self-defense, including a salvo of missiles into waters near the U.S. territory of Guam,” Mr. Kim, the North Korean researcher, told the North’s official Korean Central News Agency on Friday. “The U.S. military action hardens our determination that the U.S. should be tamed with fire and lets us take our hand closer to the ‘trigger’ for taking the toughest counter measure .”

North Korea has made similar threats against the United States for decades. But Mr. Trump has added to tensions in recent weeks by employing similarly tough talk, threatening to “totally destroy” or rain down “fire and fury” on North Korea. He has said Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson was “wasting his time” trying to negotiate with North Korea.

Despite Mr. Trump’s words, John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, saidon Thursday that North Korea’s nuclear threat was “manageable” for now.

Mr. Kelly added that Americans should be concerned that the North is getting closer to being able to hit the mainland United States with its missiles. He said there was already “great concern” about Americans living in Guam.

Also on Friday, South Korea’s meteorological authorities said that they detected a small quake near the North’s underground nuclear test site, but that it was not caused by a manmade explosion. They have detected three similar tremors from near the test site since the North’s nuclear test on Sept. 3, in which North Korea said it detonated a hydrogen bomb.

Some earthquake experts have attributed the recent tremors to underground cave-ins caused by that powerful test. Commercial satellite images have also found evidence of landslides near the North Korean site, raising fears of radioactive fallout if the North conducts another nuclear test there.