North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is planning to build the “most powerful nuclear force in the world”, state news agency KCNA reported on Sunday (27).
The “ultimate goal” behind North Korea’s nuclear program was to possess “absolute strength, unprecedented in a century,” Kim said on Saturday as part of an order promoting dozens of military officials, the agency said.
The order comes after what North Korea said was a “test of a new type” intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) on Nov.
The missile was a Hwaseong-17, according to KCNA, a massive rocket theoretically capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to the continental United States.
Kim praised the officials who developed the new missile in his comments.
He called the missile “the strongest strategic weapon in the world” and said it represented “a wonderful leap forward in the development of technology for assembling nuclear warheads into ballistic missiles”.
With the development of the new ICBM, Kim said North Korea has demonstrated to the world “the confident and ever-victorious future of our state moving forward towards the goal of building the strongest military in the world.”
In a letter sent to Kim recently, scientists at North Korea’s Academy of Defense Sciences said the test firing marked a “great historic victory” for the country and demonstrated North Korea’s sovereignty.
Kim himself attended the launch with an infant believed to be his daughter, Ju Ae.
Pyongyang also released a video of the missile launch, just the third time since 2017, according to Ankit Panda, a senior fellow in the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
While the test has shown that Pyongyang can launch a large ICBM and keep it in the air for over an hour, North Korea has yet to demonstrate the ability to place a warhead on top of a long-range ballistic missile – projectiles that are shot into space – which is capable of surviving fiery re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere.
But analysts say that with repeated testing, the North Koreans are refining their capabilities.
Source: CNN Brasil
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