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SEOUL, South Korea (AP) – North Korea has criticized the United States’ decision to supply Australia with nuclear-powered submarines and has threatened to take unspecified countermeasures if it finds out that the The deal affected his security.
State media on Monday published comments from an unidentified North Korean Foreign Ministry official who called the deal between the United States, Britain and Australia “extremely” dangerous which would destroy the balance of security in Asia-Pacific. The official said it would trigger a nuclear arms race.
The official said the North is looking closely at the deal and will proceed accordingly if it has “even a small negative impact on the security of our country.”
President Joe Biden last week announced a new alliance comprising Australia and Britain that would deliver an Australian fleet of at least eight nuclear-powered submarines. Biden stressed that the ships would be armed in a conventional manner.
France denounced the decision, accusing Australia of having concealed its intention to withdraw from a 90 billion Australian dollars (66 billion dollars) contract with Naval Group, majority owned by the French state, for the construction of 12 conventional diesel-electric submarines for Australia.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison blamed the change on the deteriorating strategic environment in the Indo-Pacific, a clear reference to China’s massive military build-up accelerating.
Apparently alluding to the French complaints, the North Korean official said the United States was accused of stabbing in the back, even by its allies. The North believes the deal would destroy “regional peace and stability and the international nuclear non-proliferation system” and catalyze an arms race.
“The current situation shows once again that building national defense capabilities from a long-term perspective should not be relaxed even a little in order to cope with the ever-changing international security environment,” he said. central Korean news agency citing the official. saying.
North Korea suspended its testing of nuclear bombs and intercontinental-range ballistic missiles that could strike the Americas in 2018, when its leader Kim Jong Un began diplomacy with former President Donald Trump while trying to take advantage of his arsenal to ease the sanctions he badly needed.
Nuclear talks between Washington and Pyongyang have stalled since the failure of a second Trump-Kim meeting in 2019, when the Americans rejected North Korean demands for major sanctions relief in exchange for dismantling a aging nuclear facility. This would only have represented a partial cession of the nuclear capacities of the North.
The North continued to test shorter-range weapons, threatening allies of the United States, South Korea and Japan, in an apparent effort to pressure the Biden administration over stalled diplomacy.
This month, the North tested a new cruise missile it plans to eventually arm with nuclear warheads and demonstrated a new system for launching ballistic missiles from trains.
The North’s wagon launches on Wednesday came hours before the South reported its first test of a submarine-launched ballistic missile. The double demonstration of military power highlighted a return of tensions in the region.
In a separate statement on Monday, the North mocked the South’s test, saying the missile was clunky and did not appear ready for military use.
Jang Chang Ha, president of the North Korean Academy for National Defense, said the rudimentary weapon system designed to fire conventional-weapon missiles did not pose an immediate threat to the North.
The North tested its Pukguksong-3 missile from a maritime platform in 2019, as part of a multi-year effort to acquire the ability to fire nuclear missiles from submarines.
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