SEOUL – President Joe Biden’s condemnation of this week’s North Korean missile launches risked provoking further weapons tests, a top regime official said today after Pyongyang’s first substantive provocation since the United States president took office.
The nuclear-armed North has a long history of using weapons tests to ramp up tensions, in a carefully calibrated process to try to forward its objectives.
Pyongyang had been biding its time since the new administration took office in Washington, not even officially acknowledging its existence until last week.
But on Thursday it launched two weapons from its east coast into the Sea of Japan, known as the East Sea in Korea.
Following the launch, Biden labelled the test a violation of UN resolutions and advised the isolated state against ramping up military testing, warning that “there will be responses if they choose to escalate”.
Ri Pyong-chol, a leading official in North Korea’s missile programme who supervised the test, said the president's comments had revealed his “deep-seated hostility” to the regime.
“Such remarks from the US president are an undisguised encroachment on our state’s right to self-defence and provocation to it,” Ri said in a statement published by state media outlet KCNA.
Ri said Pyongyang was expressing its “deep apprehension over the US chief executive faulting the regular testfire, (an) exercise of our state’s right to self-defence, as the violation of UN ‘resolutions’”.
“If the US continues with its thoughtless remarks without thinking of the consequences, it may be faced with something that is not good,” he added, warning that North Korea was prepared to “continue to increase our most thoroughgoing and overwhelming military power”. – AFP, March 27, 2021
