North Korea may soon seal its place in an exclusive global club after Kim Jong Un unveiled the country’s first nuclear-powered submarine under construction.
‘These incomparably revolutionary vessels must fulfill their mission as a nuclear power’s formidable deterrent that can overpower the hostile forces’ entrenched “gunboat diplomacy”‘, the North Korean dictator said.
He appeared as barely a spec walking alongside the vast vessel in pictures released by North Korea’s government news agency on Saturday.
The placement of the shipyard where the 7,000-ton submarine, able to carrying an estimated 10 missiles, is being built has not been disclosed.
‘It could be absolutely threatening to [South Korea] and the US’, which began a joint military training exercise this week, Moon Keun-sik, a South Korean submarine expert who teaches at Seoul’s Hanyang University, said.
Yang Moo-jin, a professor on the University of North Korean Studies, said: ‘This announcement of the development of a nuclear submarine reveals an intention to threaten the deployment of US aircraft carriers.’
Only six countries possess nuclear submarines – the USA, Russia, the UK, France, China and India.
Powering heavily-armed vessels under water for long periods of time, they permit countries to project power over vast distances.
It’s not only the missiles on board that make them a threat – the undeniable fact that have to surface less means you’re not all the time entirely sure where your enemy’s submarines are.
That appeals to Mr Kim, who said: ‘[North Korea’s] maritime defense power might be thoroughly exercised, with none restricted waters, to any waters deemed vital.’
North Korea might have already got one among the world’s largest submarine fleets – it has as much as 90 of them – but they’ve up to now all been diesel-powered.
That’s not adequate for dictator Kim Jong Un, who included possessing ‘underwater-launched nuclear strategic weapons, that are of great significance in enhancing long-range nuclear strike capabilities’ in a a five-year plan announced in 2021.
Among the many other weapons he listed were intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), hypersonic weapons, spy satellites and multi-warhead missiles.
Weapons testing has soared since then.
Last October, Mr Kim celebrated the country’s longest ballistic missile test after a Hwasong-19 ICBM flew 622 miles before landing within the sea off the Korean peninsula.
Now it seems North Korea is on the bring of completing a nuclear submarine, able to firing nuclear missiles.
The country already has an estimated 50 nuclear warheads, with the fabric to assemble 90 more, in response to the Arms Control Association.
Some can reach targets greater than 9,000 miles away, the US-based CSIS Missile Defense Project estimates.
Recent developments have caused alarm for South Korea, which Kim Jong Un ‘not sees… as a state’, North Korea expert Dr Edward Howell previously told Metro.
Last January, Mr Kim declared South Korea his country’s ‘invariable principal enemy’ abandoning his father and grandfather’s longheld ambition of peacefully reuniting North and South.
Tensions have been rising ever since. North Korea has blown up roads once linking it to the South. It has erected anti-tank barriers, and sent balloons armed with rubbish and feces over the border.
Mr Kim claims he’s defending North Korea against US-led aggression.
South Korea responded by dropping propaganda leaflets from drones, and broadcasting messages from loudspeakers across the Demilitarised Zone.
Responding to news of the nuclear submarine, US National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes said: ‘The US is committed to the entire denuclearisation of North Korea.’
But North Korea isn’t interested, it seems.
Dr Howell, a politics lecturer at Oxford University said: ‘North Korea is on the stage where it’s not even pretending to need to talk with the West, with South Korea or the US.
‘North Korea’s fundamental goal is to realize recognition internationally as a de facto nuclear state, so it’s not involved in negotiations.’
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