U.S. Flies Bomber Over South Korea In Show Of Strength, Alliance

The chairman of South Korea’s joint chiefs of staff, Lee Sun-jin, said North Korea was likely to carry out further sudden provocations.

“That’s the baseline requirement they have to rejoin the worldwide community”, McDonough said.

On Monday, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un encouraged researchers on the country’s atomic bomb programme to work for “greater successes” on the nuclear weapons project.

U.S. forces in South Korea were put on their highest level of alert on Monday in case of any provocation from North Korea, following North Korea’s nuclear test last week.

“It is the legitimate right of a sovereign state and a fair action that nobody can criticize”, the North’s Korean Central News Agency quoted Kim as saying during a tour of the Armed Forces Ministry.

Kim said the test was an act of “self-defence”.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed the two were talking about sending more US “strategic assets” to the region but said this meant deploying such things as nuclear-capable bombers rather than putting USA nuclear arms in South Korea for the first time in about a quarter century. He also sought to link the purported success of the nuclear test to a ruling Workers’ Party convention in May, the party’s first since 1980.

Pyongyang said it detonated an underground device on Wednesday, to widespread condemnation, but experts remain sceptical about the claim.

A standoff between the rival Koreas has deepened since last week’s test, the North’s fourth. “Almost all of its socioeconomic activities will be paralyzed, from the transportation sector to the military sector; inflation will rise; prices will soar; social anxiety will cause riots; and North Korean society will face a collapse”.

On the same day, North Korea forces reportedly restarted propaganda broadcasts in two sites in response. O’Shaughnessy, commander of the US 7th Air Force and Deputy Commander of the US Forces Korea, said on Sunday that the United States maintained an “ironclad” commitment to the defence of South Korea.

Meanwhile, South Korea’s Defense Ministry has confirmed its in discussions with the United States about additional U.S. deployments in South Korea.

A spokesperson for South Korea’s Unification Ministry said that in the interest of safety, only skeleton crews would be allowed to enter the Kaesong industrial park in North Korea starting Tuesday. “Countries run by dictatorships even try to control human instincts”. The tensions were eased only after marathon talks between top-level military officials of the two Koreas resulted in the so-called August 25 agreement on a series of measures to defuse tensions.

The North also released video footage of a purportedly new submarine-launched ballistic missile test three days after it claimed it had successfully tested its hydrogen bomb.

This is despite South Korea and the United States both urging China, which wields considerable economic power over North Korea as its largest trade partner, to do more to rein in the Kim regime. The plane then returned to its base on the Pacific island of Guam.

Klug reported from Seoul.