SEOUL: Kim Jong Un vowed to beef up North Korea\u2019s defense capabilities, citing military modernization efforts by South Korea and the United States pushing the region \u201cto the brink of a nuclear war,\u201d state media reported Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Pyongyang is under multiple sets of sanctions over its nuclear program, and the two Koreas remain technically at war because their 1950-53 conflict ended in an armistice rather than a peace treaty.<\/p>\n
Kim \u201cin his concluding speech reaffirmed the steadfast policy stand of our Party and state to beef up the national defense capabilities faster,\u201d the official Korean Central News Agency quoted the leader as saying.<\/p>\n
The speech was delivered as Kim presided over a three-day meeting of the Workers\u2019 Party of Korea that wrapped up on Monday, during which senior officials reviewed policy initiatives, KCNA said.<\/p>\n
It quoted Kim as saying \u201cthe US and the ROK are pushing forward with the ROK\u2019s possession of a nuclear submarine while getting evermore undisguised in their moves toward the reinforcement and modernization of armed forces in the region,\u201d referring to South Korea by the acronym of its official name.<\/p>\n
According to KCNA, Kim said such moves were \u201cpushing the situation in the Korean peninsula to the brink of a nuclear war.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the face of such developments, it was the \u201csteadfast stand\u201d of the North to \u201cfurther expand and strengthen the powerful and absolutely reliable deterrent for self-defense,\u201d Kim said.<\/p>\n
Kim\u2019s rhetoric can be seen as \u201ca narrative that justifies strengthening its nuclear capabilities in line with movements from South Korea and the US,\u201d analyst Hong Min at Seoul\u2019s Korea Institute for National Unification told AFP.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
SEOUL: Kim Jong Un vowed to beef up North Korea\u2019s defense capabilities, citing military modernization efforts by South Korea and the United States pushing the region \u201cto the brink of a nuclear war,\u201d state media reported Tuesday. Pyongyang is under multiple sets of sanctions over its nuclear program, and the two Koreas remain technically at …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":99422,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-99408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99408"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99423,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99408\/revisions\/99423"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/99422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}