South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) told lawmakers on Thursday that North Korea is preparing for a new provocative nuclear weapons test and missile launch, and could time them to coincide with President Joe Biden’s visit to Seoul.
Recent commercial satellite images of North Korea’s Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site, which the communist regime claimed it had destroyed in 2018, suggest the center has resumed construction activities for the first time since, the Associated Press (AP) reported Tuesday.
North Korea’s government suggested this week it may resume “all temporally-suspended activities,” seemingly referring to Pyongyang’s “nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) tests,” South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency reported on Thursday.
North Korea’s belligerent threats, claims of military supremacy, and claims of an official ideology based on independence and personal achievement are difficult to square with the endless series of horrifying blunders by the regime in Pyongyang.
Japanese media are reporting that a new tunnel under construction at North Korea’s Punggye-ri test site collapsed this month, killing up to 200 laborers.
On Thursday, North Korea’s Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho said his nation may soon conduct a hydrogen bomb test over the Pacific Ocean.
North Korea’s latest round of belligerent rhetoric comes from the amusingly named Korea Asia-Pacific Peace Committee, a Pyongyang propaganda outfit that threatened genocide against Japan, continental devastation for the United States, and ruination for the U.N. Security Council in its Thursday dispatch.
TEL AVIV – Amid reports that Iran is assisting North Korea with its nuclear program, Deputy Minister for Diplomacy Michael Oren asked the international community at what point it would intervene.
TEL AVIV – Iran will be closely observing the world’s reaction to North Korea’s latest nuclear test and will dictate how the Islamic Republic will move forward with its own nuclear program, former Israeli defense minister Moshe (Bogie) Ya’alon said.
South Korea put on a tremendous show of military force in a set of live-fire drills on Monday, as South Korean intelligence reported signs of activity at North Korean launch sites, possibly indicating more provocative missile launches are coming soon.
Center for Security Policy President for Research and Analysis Clare Lopez blamed political mismanagement stretching back for decades, rather than a failure of intelligence-gathering, for the shock of North Korea’s latest nuclear test on Monday’s special Labor Day edition of Breitbart News Daily.
“The U.S. is considering, in addition to other options, stopping all trade with any country doing business with North Korea,” Trump said.
President Donald Trump said “appeasement will not work” with the “rogue nation” of North Korea, because “they only understand one thing,” after dictator Kim Jong-un conducted the Communist nation’s sixth and most powerful nuclear bomb test.
South Korea’s National Intelligence Service told a closed-door session of Parliament on Monday that signs of activity have been detected at North Korea’s Punggye-ri underground nuclear test site, possibly signaling that a new nuclear test is imminent.
South Korea’s Yonhap news service reported on Wednesday that North Korea made a very tentative and conditional offer to discuss a ban on nuclear and ballistic missile testing.
A joint military exercise between the United States and Japan began in the Sea of Japan on Thursday amid tensions caused by North Korean missile launches and a possible upcoming nuclear test.
The world marked the passage of North Korea’s “Day of the Sun,” commemorating the 105th anniversary of national founder Kim Il-sung’s birth, without serious incident last weekend.
On Thursday, NBC News reported that “multiple senior U.S. intelligence officials” were saying the United States was prepared to launch a “pre-emptive strike with conventional weapons against North Korea, should officials become convinced that North Korea is about to follow through with a nuclear weapons test.”
China sent fully-loaded North Korean cargo ships home and deployed 150,000 troops to the North Korean border this week, even as a U.S. carrier group approached the Korean peninsula and Pyongyang issued threats ranging up to nuclear war.
On Tuesday, U.S. officials revealed that North Korea tested another advanced ballistic missile engine last Friday. It was the third such test in the past month.
Thae Yong-ho, a former North Korean embassy official who became one of the highest-ranking defectors from his country, said on Thursday that a potential upcoming nuclear test by the outlaw regime in Pyongyang could “break the country in two pieces” and topple the government of Kim Jong-un.
North Korea faces a new round of U.N. sanctions that will reduce its export revenues by an estimated 25 percent, in response to its illegal nuclear test in September.
A nuclear monitoring group called 38 North, based at Johns Hopkins University, believes the latest satellite surveillance shows North Korea may be preparing to conduct a sixth nuclear test detonation.
South Korea and Japan are looking to China and Russia, permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, to aid in their quest to stop North Korea from conducting yet another nuclear test, following the nation’s fifth and most powerful one yet.
North Korea claims to have conducted its fifth, and by far most powerful, nuclear bomb test on Friday morning, in defiance of United Nations resolutions. Condemnation from world leaders was immediate, including even North Korea’s patron China.
Tensions on the Korean peninsula are still running high, as the North Koreans announced the successful test of a solid-fuel rocket booster and threatened to assassinate South Korean president Park Geun-Hye by “scorching” her offices with an “ultra-precision strike.”
North Korea carried out another launch of missiles on Monday – a salvo of five short-range projectiles that brings its total number of shots from the past month to 15. Meanwhile, South Korea is touting the formation of a rapid-response force, trained with the assistance of the United States, that could carry out operations anywhere on the Korean peninsula within 24 hours of a threat emerging.
China’s state-run Xinhua news agency reports that Foreign Minister Wang Yi has agreed to a new United Nations resolution against North Korean nuclear testing.
The U.S. Air Force and Japanese Defense Ministry have both dispatched nuclear-sniffer planes to investigate North Korea’s latest nuclear test.
