The sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has hit back at a landmark nuclear agreement made between the US and South Korea, claiming it will only worsen security.
The government of Washington and Seoul made an agreement at the White House on Wednesday April 26, that aims to deter North Korean aggression, including plans to deploy a nuclear-armed submarine in South Korea for the first time since the 1980s.
In comments on state-run KCNA, Kim Yo Jong slammed the deal as a “typical product of their extreme anti-North Korean hostile policy, reflecting the most hostile and aggressive will of action.
Yo-Jong, the vice department director of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, said: ‘South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s recent visit to Washington was an occasion for us to have much clearer understanding about the root cause and physical entity disturbing peace and security of the Korean Peninsula and the region.’
“As such, it will 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 welcomed.”
She criticized US leader Joe Biden for his statement that any nuclear attack against the US and its allies will result in the end of the North Korean regime, condemning it as a “nonsensical remark from the person in his dotage.”
“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,” the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) quoted her as saying.
She slammed Biden as an ‘old man with no future,’ who is ‘irresponsibly brave’.
‘We cannot let pass nor overlook is the fact that the chief executive of the enemy state officially and personally used the word “the end of regime” under the eyes of the world,’ she said.
‘Would we simply regard it as the man’s senility?’
Yo-Jong described Washington as the North’s ‘most hostile adversary’ which has used ‘threatening rhetoric for which he should be prepared for far too great an after-storm that will not be easy for us to deliver’.
She then went ahead to call South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol a “fool.”
Her comments mark the first response North Korea has made to the security pact between both countries.
Kim Yo Jong, the younger sister of Kim Jong Un, is a powerful figure in North Korea after she was promoted to the nation’s top decision-making body in September 2021.
She is believed to be one of her brother’s most trusted confidantes. South Korea’s National Intelligence Service previously assessed her to be the country’s “de facto second in command.”
The new agreement says that the US intends to “take steps to make our deterrence more visible through the regular deployment of strategic assets, including a US nuclear ballistic submarine visit to South Korea,” a US official said.
In a joint news conference at the White House, Biden hailed what he called the “ironclad” alliance between the two countries.
The president also offered a stark warning to Kim. “A nuclear attack by North Korea against the United States or its allies and partners is unacceptable, and will result in the end of whatever regime were to take such an action,” Biden said.