Kim Jong-un’s sister blasts ‘senile’ Biden over ‘end’ of North Korea regime warning
- Kim Yo-jong said a Washington-Seoul deal aimed at strengthening deterrence against Pyongyang would only make things worse
- She also called Biden ‘too miscalculating and irresponsibly brave’ over his warning that North Korean nuclear aggression would result in the end of its regime
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Kim Yo-jong said the North was convinced that a nuclear deterrent “should be brought to further perfection.”
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“The more the enemies are dead set on staging nuclear war exercises, and the more nuclear assets they deploy in the vicinity of the Korean peninsula, the stronger the exercise of our right to self-defence will become in direct proportion to them,” she said, according to the official Korean Central News Agency.
Yoon and Biden issued what was titled the Washington Declaration, bolstering the US nuclear umbrella over South Korea, which is increasingly nervous about Pyongyang’s aggression.
It will involve the “regular deployment of strategic assets” including the first South Korean port visit by a nuclear ballistic submarine in decades, a US official said this week.
The agreement, however, would “only result in making peace and security of Northeast Asia and the world be exposed to more serious danger, and it is an act that can thus never be welcome”, Kim Yo-jong said.
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She lashed out at Biden over his blunt warning that North Korean nuclear aggression would result in the end of its regime, calling him senile and “too miscalculating and irresponsibly brave.” However, she said the North wouldn’t simply dismiss his words as a “nonsensical remark from the person in his dotage.”
“When we consider that this expression was personally used by the president of the US, our most hostile adversary, it is threatening rhetoric for which he should be prepared for far too great an after-storm,” she said.
She added it was “too much for him to serve out the two-year remainder of his office term”, before then calling Yoon a “fool”.
Seoul condemned Kim Yo-jong’s “far-fetched” statement.
It “reflects its nervousness and frustration at the drastically strengthened nuclear deterrence of the Korea-US alliance,” South Korea’s Unification Ministry said.
The ministry, which is in charge of inter-Korean relations, added that the statement’s “rude language” demonstrated “the North’s lowly level”.
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Kim Yo-jong’s statement indicates military tensions around the Korean peninsula could “dramatically escalate to a level similar from 2017”, Cheong Seong-chang of the Centre for North Korea Studies at the Sejong Institute said.
The statement also represents Pyongyang’s “strong protest at Biden’s remark that the North would face the end of the regime if it carried out a nuclear attack”, he said.
Pyongyang conducted a record-breaking string of sanctions-defying launches this year, including test-firing the country’s first solid-fuel ballistic missile – a key technical breakthrough for Kim Jong-un’s military.
Additional reporting by Associated Press
