Kim Jong Un upped the ante this weekend with his most threatening announcement to-date: that North Korea possesses nuclear weapons with which to tip an ICBM for launch.
The announcement comes just days after the U.S. and South Korea ran joint bombing test runs near the North Korean border in response to more saber rattling earlier in the week following a test launch of its ICBM over Japan.
Just when we thought the build up to an attack on Guam had subsided, it’s like deja vu all over again.
Though the Trump administration continues to indicate that diplomatic action will always be the first option, the military maneuvers in the Pacific are telegraphing a completely different scenario.
The question is whether we’ll respond to the next test launch. Either way we react we’re sending a message to Kim.
What will that message be?
Here’s more from Washington Examiner…
North Korea’s official news agency, KCNA, said the country has developed a hydrogen bomb that the country expects to put onto an intercontinental ballistic missile.
The news agency noted that the hydrogen bomb has “great destructive power” and can be detonated at high altitudes and that the country can build as many of the weapons as it wants since the components are produced in North Korea, according to Reuters. The report came Sunday, local time, adding that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un inspected the device.
No independent confirmation of the weapaon has been made as of press time.
Pyongyang continued a string of provocations in the region last week, launching a ballistic missile that flew over Japan. In the past few months it has conducted a number of missile tests — which some experts fear show the country’s growing capability of reaching U.S. targets — and Kim’s regime has repeatedly threatened the U.S. territory of Guam, an island in the Pacific.
