Trump is a ‘dotard’ says Kim amid new nuke threat

NORTH Korea raised the stakes in its standoff with the US yesterday when it threatened to test a hydrogen bomb over the Pacific Ocean.

The country’s dictator Kim Jong-un, pictured on TV yesterday, also issued a statement calling Donald Trump ‘a mentally deranged dotard’ who would ‘pay dearly’ for threatening the regime.

The US President responded by tweeting: ‘Kim Jong Un of North Korea, who is obviously a madman who doesn’t mind starving or killing his people, will be tested like never before!’

The archaic word ‘dotard’ means ‘an old person, especially one who has become weak or senile’, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

North Korea has conducted at least 14 missile tests this year including two launched over Japan. It also carried out its biggest underground nuclear test earlier this month – a weapon 16 times more powerful than the US bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.

The latest threat came from North Korean foreign minister Ri Yongho, who suggested Kim was considering testing ‘an unprecedented scale hydrogen bomb’ in the Pacific Ocean.

This would be likely to involve attaching a live nuclear warhead to a missile that has been tested only a few times and flying it over Japan – a prospect one expert called ‘truly terrifying’.

The threat was made hours after Kim’s latest verbal attack on the US President.

The despot was angered by Mr Trump’s maiden speech at the UN General Assembly on Thursday, when he called Kim ‘a rocket man… on a suicide mission’ and warned that if the US ‘is forced to defend ourselves or our allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea’.

Kim retaliated with his ‘dotard’ slur, and also called Mr Trump ‘a rogue and a gangster fond of playing with fire’, before warning on TV: ‘We will consider… a corresponding, highest level of hard- line countermeasure in history.’

The US and Japan say they will shoot down any missile they consider a threat to Japanese territory. The US has also ramped up sanctions on North Korean shipping, banking, ports and manufacturing.

Discussing the prospect of a hydrogen bomb being fired over Japan, Vipin Narang, a nuclear strategy expert at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, told The Guardian: ‘If the test doesn’t go according to plan, you could have population at risk. It is truly terrifying if something goes wrong.’