SEOUL — On Friday, North Korea retaliated angrily against the United States aircraft carrier battle group’s arrival in South Korea, labeling the event a provocation and reiterating the threat of nuclear retaliation.
North Korea, buoyed by the progress of its nuclear arsenal, has progressively escalated its threats to employ said weapons in a preventative manner. However, the North remains militarily superior to South Korean and American forces, and experts believe it is improbable that it will first employ its nuclear weapons. However, it will continue to enhance its arsenal in the interim, avoiding a return to diplomacy.
A day after the USS Ronald Reagan and its battle group arrived at the southeastern port of Busan, South Korea, after a naval exercise conducted jointly by the United States, South Korea, and Japan in international waters earlier this week, the North issued its most recent nuclear threat.
According to South Korean defense officials, the carrier will be docked at Busan for five days by an agreement to increase the temporary deployments of potent U.S. military assets in response to the North’s expanding nuclear program.
The North’s official Korean Central News Agency referred to the aircraft carrier’s arrival on Friday as “an undisguised military provocation” that demonstrates the United States is carrying out its plan to attack North Korea. By its escalatory nuclear doctrine, which permits the preemptive deployment of nuclear weapons, it issued a threat of retaliation.
North Korea Raises The Specter Of Nuclear Strike Over US Aircraft Carrier’s Arrival In South Korea.
“The (North Korean) doctrine on the use of nuclear weapons, which has been made public, permits the implementation of essential action procedures in the event that it is subjected to a nuclear attack or believes one is imminently threatened with such an action,” the KCNA dispatch stated.
KCNA added, “North Korea’s “most potent and swift initial assault will target the United States’ ‘extended deterrence’ methods, which are employed to delude its adherents, as well as the bases of evil in the vicinity of the Korean peninsula.”
North Korea has maintained that it was compelled to develop nuclear weapons in response to alleged invasion schemes by the United States and South Korea. Its reactions to deploying U.S. strategic assets, including aircraft carriers, long-range bombers, nuclear-powered submarines, and U.S. joint training exercises with South Korean forces have frequently been vehement.
According to several experts, North Korea escalates tensions with its adversaries as a pretext to expand its nuclear arsenal and then uses the weapons as leverage to extract greater concessions from the outside world.
North Korea has conducted over a hundred missile tests since the previous year in retaliation for the increased military exercises between the United States and South Korea. Both Seoul and Washington assert that their exercises are defensive.
Last year, North Korea enacted a law that delineates an extensive array of circumstances under which it may employ nuclear weapons. Such circumstances include the assessment that its leadership is confronted with an impending hostile assault or the necessity to avert an unspecified calamitous crisis that endangers its people and government.
North Korea Raises The Specter Of Nuclear Strike Over US Aircraft Carrier’s Arrival In South Korea.
North Korea’s government, led by Kim Jong Un, would be overthrown if it attempted to employ nuclear weapons, as both the United States and South Korean governments have warned on multiple occasions.
North Korea additionally levied allegations against the United States on Friday, claiming that the rumor that Hamas utilized North Korean armaments in its recent assault on Israel is “baseless and false.” Before this, several news organizations—including Radio Free Asia, which the United States government funds—had reported on Hamas’s alleged utilization of North Korean munitions, including F-7 high-explosive fragmentation rockets.
“It should not be disregarded that the United States is intentionally associating the recent Middle East crisis with (North Korea) through its stereotypical smear campaign,” Ri Kwang Song, an expert on North Korean international affairs, told KCNA in an article attributed to him.
Without naming them, Ri stated that the rumors are being disseminated by “reptile press bodies and quasi-experts” affiliated with the U.S. administration.
SOURCE – (AP)
