An official North Korean website warned Monday that Pyongyang will “wipe out” the United States if Washington starts a war on the peninsula, the latest tit-for-tat saber-rattling that has sent tensions soaring in the region.
The US super carrier Carl Vinson will arrive in waters off the Korean peninsula “in a matter of days”, Vice President Mike Pence said Saturday, amid reports the North could be preparing a sixth nuclear test.
In a series of editorials the Rodong Sinmun newspaper — the official mouthpiece of the ruling Workers’ Party — said the North’s forces were undeterred and called the US strike group’s imminent arrival “undisguised military blackmail”.
“Such threat may startle a jellyfish, but can never work on the DPRK,” it said Monday, using the country’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
A day earlier it said the North’s revolutionary forces were “combat-ready to sink the US nuclear aircraft carrier with a single strike”.
Tensions in the region rises every spring, when the US and South Korea hold joint exercises, with the North sees them as rehearsals for an attack.
A separate editorial on the North’s propaganda website Uriminzokkiri Monday said that the dispatching of the Carl Vinson signaled a war: “It is proof that an invasion of the North is nearing day by day.”
The editorial, described as being written by an army officer, said it was a “big miscalculation” for Washington to compare the North to Syria, which did not launch an “immediate counterattack” after a US cruise missile strike earlier this month.
In the event of an attack, it said, “The world will witness how Washington’s rash nuclear aircraft carriers are turned into a huge pile of steel and buried at sea and how a country called America is wiped out from the Earth.”
There is speculation the North may conduct another test to mark the 85th anniversary of the founding of its Korean People’s Army (KPA) on Tuesday.
Source: AFP
