[Mr. Kim’s order, which
North Korea said was given during an emergency meeting early Friday, was
similar to the one issued Tuesday when the North’s top military command told
all its missile and artillery units to be on the “highest alert” and ready to
strike the United States and South Korea in retaliation against their joint
military exercises.]
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Jon Chol Jin/Associated Press
University students marched through Kim Il Sung
Square in downtown Pyongyang,
North Korea,
on Friday.
|
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korean state media said Friday that the country’s leader,
Kim Jong-un, had ordered his missile units to be ready to strike the United
States and South Korea, which South Korean officials said could signal either
preparations for missile tests or just more blustering.
The United States
criticized the North Korean threat, which came one day after American forces
had carried out an unusual practice bombing
exercise with advanced aircraft across South Korea.
“The United States is
fully capable of defending itself and our allies,” said Lt. Col. Catherine
Wilkinson, a Pentagon spokeswoman in Washington."North Korea’s bellicose
rhetoric and threats follow a pattern designed to raise tensions and intimidate
others.”
The back-and-forth was
viewed with worry by China and Russia. China’s Foreign Ministry reiterated its
calls for restraint. Russia was more explicit, with its foreign minister,
Sergey V. Lavrov, telling reporters in Moscow that he was increasingly
concerned about a situation that could “get out of control — it will descend
into the spiral of a vicious cycle.”
Mr. Kim’s order, which
North Korea said was given during an emergency meeting early Friday, was
similar to the one issued Tuesday when the North’s top military command told
all its missile and artillery units to be on the “highest alert” and ready to
strike the United States and South Korea in retaliation against their joint
military exercises.
But by attributing such
an order to its top leader, North Korea tried to add weight to its threat.
“We believe they are
taking follow-up steps,” said Kim Min-seok, spokesman of the South Korean
Defense Ministry, referring to increased activities of the North Korean
military units. "South Korean and American intelligence authorities are
closely watching whether North Korea is preparing its short, medium, and
long-range missiles, including its Scud, Rodong and Musudan.”
He did not elaborate.
But government officials and South Korean media said that there had been a
surge in vehicle and troop movements at North Korean missile units in recent
days as the United States and South Korea has been conducting joint military
drills. The national news agency Yonhap quoted an anonymous military source as
saying that North Korean vehicles had been moving to Tongchang-ri near the
North’s western border with China, where its Unha-3 rocket blasted off in
December.
North Korea might be
preparing for an engine test ahead of a long-range rocket test, the source was
quoted as saying. Scud and Rodong are the North's mainstay short- and
medium-range missiles. The Musudan, deployed around 2007 and displayed for the
first time during a military parade in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, in
2010, is a road-mobile intermediate-range ballistic missile with a range of
more than 1,900 miles, according to the South Korean Defense Ministry.
In an angry reaction to
the sanctions that the United Nations imposed after North Korea’s launching of
a three-stage rocket in December and its third nuclear test last month, the
North has repeatedly threatened to strike Washington, as well as the American
military bases around the Pacific and in South Korea, with nuclear-armed
long-range missiles.
A photo released by the
North’s official Korean Central News Agency on Friday showed Mr. Kim conferring
with his top generals on what the agency called “plans to strike the mainland
U.S.” A military chart behind them showed what appeared to be trajectories of
North Korean missiles hitting major cities in the United States.
North Korea also said
its leader, Mr. Kim, “finally signed the plan on technical preparations of
strategic rockets of the K.P.A., ordering them to be standby for fire so that
they may strike any time the U.S. mainland, its military bases in the
operational theaters in the Pacific, including Hawaii and Guam, and those in
South Korea.” K.P.A. stands for the Korean People’s Army.
Kim Min-seok, the South
Korean spokesman, said the North’s “unusual” public announcement of such plans
was partly “psychological.” Many experts and South Korean officials doubted
that North Korea has such long-range missiles, much less the know-how to make a
nuclear warhead small enough to mount on such rockets.
But other analysts
believed that the North’s new KN-08 missiles, which were put on public display
last April, were indeed intercontinental ballistic missiles, although they and
Musudan have never been test-launched before. They wondered whether North Korea
might use the current tensions as an excuse to launch them.
The country is barred
from launching ballistic missiles under United Nations sanctions. North Korea’s
development of the KN-08 was one of the reasons the Pentagon cited last Friday
when it announced a $1 billion plan to add more missile interceptors in Alaska
to better protect the United States against a potential North Korean missile
attack.
Although North Korea
issued strident threats and stirred up fears of American invasion during
previous joint American-South Korean military drills, Mr. Kim has been far more
aggressive in issuing such threats personally than his late father, Kim
Jong-il, was. Unlike his father, who had expanded his power base from his
youth, Mr. Kim was catapulted into top leadership after his father’s sudden
death in 2011 and must build his credentials as head of his “military-first”
government, South Korean analysts and officials said.
Hours after Mr. Kim’s
call to arms, thousands of North Koreans turned out for a 90-minute mass rally
at the main square in Pyongyang, chanting “Death to the U.S. imperialists” and
“Sweep away the U.S. aggressors,” according to The Associated Press, which has
a bureau in Pyongyang. Soldiers and students marched through downtown
Pyongyang.
On Thursday, the
American military carried out a rare long-range practice bombing run over the
Korean Peninsula, sending two nuclear-capable B-2 stealth bombers on a practice
sortie over South Korea, underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend its
ally amid rising tensions with North Korea.
“The reaction to the B-2
that we’re most concerned about is not necessarily the reaction it might elicit
in North Korea, but rather among our Japanese and Korean allies,” Gen. Martin
E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during a news
conference at the Pentagon. “Those exercises are mostly to assure our allies
that they can count on us to be prepared and to help them deter conflict.”
Andrew Roth contributed reporting from Moscow,
and Thom Shanker from Washington.