SEOUL-Kim Jong Un has called for boosting North Korea’s navy, saying the country’s waters brimmed with “the danger of a nuclear war,” state media reported Tuesday, as Seoul, Washington, and Tokyo carried out joint naval drills.
Kim slammed growing trilateral cooperation between the “gang bosses” of the United States, South Korea, and Japan, saying they had recently “closeted with each other”, the official Korean Central News Agency reported, in an apparent reference to this month’s Camp David summit.
He accused Washington of being “more frantic than ever before” by conducting joint naval exercises and deploying nuclear strategic assets in the waters around the Korean peninsula on a permanent basis, the report said.
“Owing to the reckless confrontational moves of the US and other hostile forces, the waters of the Korean Peninsula have been reduced into the world’s biggest war hardware concentration spot, the most unstable waters with the danger of a nuclear war,” Kim said, according to KCNA. “To achieve the successes in rapidly developing the naval force has become a very urgent issue in view of the enemies’ recent aggressive attempts.” Kim acknowledged that the North’s navy “had not been armed with up-to-date weapons and combat equipment” but said that even so, it had managed “great achievements of more weighty significance” than the country’s better-funded army