SEOUL: North Korea said on Thursday (Jul 20) the current port visit of a US nuclear-armed submarine to South Korea “may fall under the conditions” for Pyongyang to use nuclear weapons, its defence minister said.
Relations between the two Koreas are at one of their lowest points, with diplomacy stalled and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un calling for increased weapons development, including tactical nuclear weapons.
“I remind the US military of the fact that the ever-increasing visibility of the deployment of the strategic nuclear submarine and other strategic assets may fall under the conditions of the use of nuclear weapons specified in the DPRK law on the nuclear force policy,” Pyongyang’s defence minister Kang Sun Nam said in a statement.
A White House official announced on Tuesday that a US nuclear-armed submarine was making a South Korean port call for the first time in four decades.
South Korea’s President Yoon Suk-yeol, who has sought to boost ties between Seoul and Washington in the face of growing North Korean threats, visited the Ohio-class submarine on Wednesday in southern Busan port.
Washington last deployed one of its nuclear-capable submarines to South Korea in 1981.
“The hostile forces posed the most undisguised and direct nuclear threat to the DPRK by bringing an Ohio-class strategic nuclear submarine to the Busan Port operation base, which means strategic nuclear weapons have been deployed on the Korean peninsula for the first time after 40 odd years,” Kang said, referring to the North by its official name.
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