North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said his country aimed to have the world’s most powerful nuclear force as he celebrated the launch of its newest intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) at a ceremony with his daughter, state media reported yesterday.
Kim also handed promotions to more than 100 officials and scientists for their work on the Hwasong-17 — dubbed the “monster missile” by analysts and believed to be capable of reaching the US mainland — just days after Pyongyang test-fired it in one of its most powerful launches yet.
Hailing the new ICBM as “the world’s strongest strategic weapon,” Kim said that North Korean scientists had made a “wonderful leap forward in the development of the technology of mounting nuclear warheads on ballistic missiles,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported.
Photo: EPA-EFE / Korean Central News Agency
Building a nuclear force to protect the dignity and sovereignty of the state and the people “is the greatest and most important revolutionary cause, and its ultimate goal is to possess the world’s most powerful strategic force, the absolute force unprecedented in the century,” Kim was quoted as saying.
The leading officials and scientists had demonstrated to the world Pyongyang’s “goal of building the world’s strongest army,” he added.
The launch vehicle for the new Hwasong-17 ICBM was awarded the title of “DPRK Hero,” a separate KCNA report said, using the initials for the North’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
It “clearly proved before the world that the DPRK is a full-fledged nuclear power,” the report said, adding that North Korea “fully demonstrated its might as the most powerful ICBM state.”
Hong Min, director of the Korea Institute for National Unification, a South Korean think tank, said the North’s trumpeting of the Hwasong-17’s test-firing was aimed at elevating its status as a nuclear power.
“If the [launch of the] Hwasong-15 in 2017 was focused on becoming a nation that can threaten the US mainland with nukes, the latest missile is focusing on becoming the most powerful ICBM state,” he said.
The official Rodong Sinmun newspaper carried more than a dozen pictures of Kim and his “beloved daughter” at a photo session on Saturday with officials and scientists who had contributed to the successful test-firing of the missile.
Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, said the daughter’s presence was meant to portray Hwasong-17 as “the protector of the future generation.”
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