North Korea’s communist dictator Kim Jong-un regaled his soldiers with a violent rant in which he questioned the mental abilities of South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, state media reported on Friday, and asserted he would “without hesitation” use nuclear weapons if deemed necessary.
The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), Pyongyang’s flagship state propaganda outlet, reported that Kim supervised military training and delivered his remarks to commanding officers in his military on Tuesday, focusing on response to South Korea celebrating its Armed Forces Day with a parade on the same day. The South Korean parade featured the display of some of Seoul’s most powerful missiles, including a massive conventional missile clearly intended to send a message to Pyongyang that it would face a significant attack in response to any preemptive nuclear strike.
In addition to Kim’s speech, his sister, senior communist official Kim Yo-jong, published a commentary on Friday mocking South Korea’s missiles and declaring its military inferior due to its lack of nuclear weapons.
Kim Jong-un first used his address to the training soldiers to insult Yoon, noting that his South Korean counterpart had used his speech to discourage Kim from bombing his country.
“The puppet Yoon bragged about overwhelming counteraction of their military muscle at the doorstep of a state possessing nuclear weapons,” Kim said, “and it was a great irony that caused misgivings about whether he is an abnormal man,” apparently suggesting that Yoon has below-average mental capacity.
Elsewhere in Kim’s rant, the dictator announced that “the enemy” would “never deprive us of our nuclear weapons,” calling them “an irreversibly absolute strength as a nuclear power.”
“‘If’ the enemy, seized with extreme foolishness and recklessness, make a step forward and attempt to use their armed forces to encroach upon the sovereignty of our Republic,” Kim vowed, “the DPRK [North Korea] will use without hesitation all the striking forces in its possession, including nuclear weapons.”
He added the caveat that he allegedly did not intend the statement as a “rhetorical threat, but a realistic prediction of the physical destructive power, which the world people cannot but admit.”
Kim Yo-jong, meanwhile, focused on addressing the weapons on display at South Korea’s military parade on Tuesday. The highlight of the parade was the display of a missile model known as “Hyunmoo-5,” which South Korea’s JoongAng Daily described as a “monster” conventional missile capable of carrying eight-ton warheads and causing damage comparable to a tactical nuclear weapon.
Kim’s sister scoffed in her commentary at the possibility that a conventional weapon could be in any way similar to a nuclear bomb, calling the parade a “foolish farce” by a “group of curs.”
“If a man has a certain degree of common sense, he could not talk about the ‘end of regime’ of someone with a weapon of worthless large bulk. They must know the shame,” Kim Yo-jong wrote. Kim was referring to Yoon’s threat that Seoul and Washington would jointly eliminate the North Korean communist regime if it attacked either with a nuclear weapon.
“They can never cross the wall of inferiority in strength, the fate of a non-nuclear weapon state,” Kim declared, again insulting South Korea as a “a mange-affected dog wearing a helmet. No matter how much the dog may wear helmets, it can’t be a tiger or a lion.”
The South Korean Defense Ministry responded to the outbursts from North Korea by declaring them “absolutely unacceptable.”
Kim Jong-un has significantly increased the frequency with which he has issued belligerent threats against South Korea during the presidency of outgoing American commander-in-chief Joe Biden, as well as repeatedly calling for his country to expand its nuclear weapons arsenal. In January 2023, Kim announced a plan in a speech to “exponentially” increase the number of nuclear warheads in his arsenal, a vow he repeated in September.
“Now that the south [sic] Korean puppet forces who designated the DPRK [North Korea] as their ‘principal army’ [sic] and openly trumpet about ‘preparations for war’ have assumed our undoubted enemy,” Kim said in January 2023, “it highlights the importance and necessity of a mass-producing of tactical nuclear weapons and calls for an exponential increase of the country’s nuclear arsenal.”
A report published in June by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) found that North Korea is believed to possess 50 nuclear warheads as of 2024, 20 more than it did in 2023.
In addition to the warheads, North Korean state media has announced the development of a variety of strange, allegedly advanced new weapons in the past year, such as a “super-large” conventional missile warhead, a fleet of suicide drones, and an “underwater nuclear weapon system.” In an unprecedented display, Pyongyang published images in September that it claimed to show a uranium enrichment facility intended to generate fuel for more nuclear warheads.
KCNA claimed at the time that the facility was “dynamically producing nuclear materials by studying, developing and introducing all the system elements,” granting Kim “great satisfaction.”
