North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s regime threatened to call down a “bolt of lightning” on South Korea one day after a pair of missile launches that spurred a series of warnings from the United States and its regional allies.
“A frightened dog barks louder,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency said Monday, per Yonhap, a South Korean outlet. “If [South Korea] continues to bark noisily, it could be struck by a bolt of lightning.”
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The northern regime tested an intercontinental ballistic missile on Sunday, vindicating a prediction by a senior South Korean official who traveled to Washington, D.C., last week for nuclear consultations. The regime has conducted numerous missile tests in recent years, spurring a dramatic upgrade in security cooperation between the U.S., South Korea, and Japan.
“This and all DPRK launches that use ballistic missile technology are violations of multiple Security Council resolutions, they threaten the entire global community, and they are intended to refine and further develop the DPRK’s unlawful weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs,” Nate Evans, a spokesman for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, said Monday. “The Security Council must denounce the DPRK’s ongoing reckless behavior, and all U.N. member states must fully implement all relevant Security Council resolutions to curb the DPRK’s generation of revenue for its unlawful WMD and ballistic missile programs.”
Such calls seem to fall on deaf ears in Beijing and Moscow. Russian President Vladimir Putin hosted his North Korean counterpart on a portentous tour of a Russian space facility in September, and a China’s top diplomat assured a North Korean official on Monday that the relationship between the two communist regimes is “a valuable asset for both sides,” as a spokesman put it.
“The Korean Peninsula issues are complex,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said Monday. “The development of the situation fully proves that trying to solve the problem through military deterrence and pressuring will not work and will only do the opposite and make the issues and tensions worse. Dialogue and consultation is the fundamental way for settling the peninsula issues.”
North Korea’s burgeoning missile arsenal has raised the alarming specter of an unpredictable rogue regime capable of delivering nuclear weapons to the American homeland. U.S. officials in both parties have tried to orchestrate negotiations to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula, including, most dramatically, former President Donald Trump’s decision to meet Kim for a pair of unprecedented summits, but Kim refused to offer “meaningful” concessions concerning his nuclear program. In recent months, the U.S. has renewed military exercises with South Korea, which Trump had paused as an olive branch to Kim, and expanded the drills to include Japan.
“We strongly condemn these launches, which are not only a clear violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions but also threaten regional peace and stability,” Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told an audience of regional diplomats at a summit in Tokyo on Monday, per a U.S. Naval Institute News translation. “We look forward to continuing to work with you to achieve the complete verifiable and irreversible dismantling of all North Korean weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles of all ranges.”
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In the meantime, the U.S. and South Korea could send Kim a warning of their own, according to a South Korean defense official who hinted at a possible military exercise to practice the “decapitation” of the North Korean regime.
“It is difficult to speak publicly about the decapitation [drill],” South Korean Defense Minister Shin Won-sik said cryptically in an interview with a South Korean outlet.
