North Korea says it has tested an underwater nuclear weapon drone, in response to an increase in naval drills by the U.S., South Korea and Japan, but Korea watchers said they’ve seen no sign of the alleged drones.
North Korea’s official news agency said the Communist country’s armed forces “will strike horror into [the] hearts” of what it called “military gangsters” with an underwater nuclear system dubbed “Haeil-5-23.”
South Korea’s defense ministry said that if the drone actually exists, it posed a new threat to “peace on [the] Korean Peninsula and the world,” and added that “if North Korea directly provokes us, we will respond in an overwhelming manner following the principle of immediate, strong, and terminal action,” the BBC reported.
The report comes amid rising tension between the two Koreas, after the North said it was abandoning hope of peaceful unification with the democratic South, and had now declared South Korea its “main enemy.”
Two top U.S. analysts on North Korea say they believe the country’s leader Kim Jong Un has already decided to go to war, and could launch an attack on South Korea or the United States at any time.
“The situation on the Korean Peninsula is more dangerous than it has been at any time since early June 1950,” when the Korean War began, Robert L. Karlin and Sigfried Hecker wrote in the 38 North blog of the Stimson Center, a U.S. think tank.
“We believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war,” the pair wrote last week in a memo that was widely circulated in foreign-policy circles.
“We do not know when or how Kim plans to pull the trigger, but the danger is already far beyond the routine warnings in Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo about Pyongyang’s “provocations.”
Last weekend, North Korea claimed to have deployed a new solid-fuelled intermediate-range ballistic missile, and last September, the North claimed to have built its first nuclear-armed submarine.
Kim has been supplying Russia with ammunition for his war against Ukraine, and earlier this week, North Korea’s foreign minister visited Moscow.
