North Korea has intensified its fiery rhetoric about its threat to use nuclear weapons, days after a US soldier was detained for crossing the border from South Korea.
The country’s defense minister, Kang Sun Nam, has said he would approve the use of nuclear weapons “in case [a] a nuclear attack is launched against them or the use of nuclear weapons against them is judged to be imminent,” state news agency KCNA reported Thursday.
The warning came after the 23-year-old private. Travis King, 2nd Class, fled across the border during a tour of the Joint Security Area, a UN-administered area between North and South Korea, on Tuesday.
North Korea has so far remained silent on the King’s status.
The isolated communist nation has long threatened to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles in self-defense amid what it calls active Western plans to launch an attack on it.
US and South Korean military leaders met on Tuesday to discuss their shared response in the event of a North Korean attack, which coincided with the arrival of a nuclear-armed US ballistic missile submarine in South Korea, for the first time since the 1980s.
Pyongyang said the meeting was a clear provocation and a precursor to a Western attack, whose plans have entered “the most critical stage,” making the war on the Korean peninsula “a dangerous reality.”
“In particular, the hostile forces posed the most direct and undisguised nuclear threat to the DPRK by bringing an Ohio-class strategic nuclear submarine to the Pusan port team site, meaning that strategic nuclear weapons have been deployed on the Korean peninsula for the first time in 40 years,” Kang’s statement said.
North Korea regularly launches ballistic missile tests, most recently last week when the country’s leader Kim Jong Un vowed to improve his nuclear deterrent capabilities.
Meanwhile, King’s fate remains unclear.
Defense Department spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said Wednesday that the United States had been in contact with Sweden, through which Washington maintains embassy-level relations with North Korea, but had not heard back.
Previous defectors, such as Charles Jenkins, a 24-year-old Army sergeant who crossed the border in 1965, were treated as propaganda assets and remained in North Korea for years before being returned to the US.
Jenkins was avoiding being sent to fight in Vietnam, while there is no sign of similar objections from King, who had been in legal trouble in South Korea.
It emerged on Thursday that he spent 48 days in a prison in Cheonan, a city about 50 miles south of the South Korean capital Seoul, after he failed to pay a $4,000 fine on charges that included damaging public property.
According to legal documents, King was uncooperative when officers detained him in October after he caused hundreds of dollars of damage to a police cruiser while yelling profanity about Koreans and the Korean military.
The latest American to stray into North Korea, Bruce Byron Lowrance, was freed a month after he entered the country illegally via China in 2018.
That came after President Donald Trump held a joint summit with Kim Jong Un and vowed to end the country’s nuclear escalation.
