Less than a week after US president-elect Donald Trump taunted North Korea over its ballistic missile capabilities, Pyongyang said it could conduct its first test of an intercontinental missile “any time and anywhere” in a rebuke to the incoming president.
Although North Korea has vowed to develop the ability to attack the US with nuclear warheads and has tested missiles that can reach throughout the Korean Peninsula and its vicinity, it has never tested a long-range missile that could fly over the Pacific.
In a New Year’s Day speech, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said his country had reached a “final stage” in preparing to test an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).
Photo: AFP
That drew a Twitter post the next day from Trump that said: “It won’t happen!”
On Sunday, an unidentified spokesman of the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs told the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA): “The ICBM will be launched anytime and anywhere determined by our supreme leadership.”
The spokesman’s remarks, made public on the KCNA Web site yesterday, were in response to comments on Thursday by US Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken that North Korea had made “a qualitative improvement” in its missile capabilities over the past year.
Blinken added that Washington and its allies would continue “comprehensive, sustained pressure and sanctions” against the North.
On NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter said that the US would shoot down a North Korean missile “if it were coming towards our territory or the territory of our friends and allies.”
It remains unclear how close North Korea has come to building a reliable ICBM. Although it has displayed the road-mobile KN-08, believed to be its first ICBM, during military parades in recent years, it has never flight-tested the system.
However, North Korea has in the past year boasted of successfully testing key technologies, such as long-range missile engines and heat shields for an ICBM.
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