THE country’s leader Kim Jong-un’s powerful sister condemned upcoming joint military drills by South Korea, the United States and Japan as a “reckless show of strength” that would bring “bad results”, state media said.
The allies will hold joint military drills this week off the South’s Jeju Island, combining naval, air and missile defence exercises to better prepare against threats from the nuclear-armed North.
Seoul and Washington, which stations over 28,000 troops in South Korea, will stage a tabletop military exercise, aimed at integrating their military assets.
Kim Yo-jong yesterday slammed the drills as a “dangerous idea”, in a statement carried by state news outlet KCNA.
“The reckless show of strength made by them (the allies) in real action in the vicinity of the DPRK, which is the wrong place, will inevitably bring bad results to themselves,” she said, using the acronym for North Korea.
Pyongyang has long baulked at such joint military drills involving the allies, calling them rehearsals for an invasion.
The North perceives the trilateral drills as “scenarios for limited or full-scale nuclear strikes and attempts to neutralise its launch platforms”, said Hong Min, a senior analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification.
“The North is likely using the allied exercises as a pretext to push ahead with nuclear modernisation and conventional upgrades,” he added.
Yo-jong’s statement follows a visit by her brother to weapons research facilities this week, where he said Pyongyang “would put forward the policy of simultaneously pushing forward the building of nuclear forces and conventional armed forces”. — AFP
