According to Vice President Mike Pence, the US supercarrier Carl Vinson will arrive in waters off the Korean peninsula “in a matter of days” amid reports the North could be preparing a sixth nuclear test.
Pyongyang is still believed to be far from reaching its aim of building a missile capable of reaching the US mainland, but the secretive nation has ramped up its rhetoric in recent weeks and has carried out two rocket tests this month alone.
In a series of editorials the Rodong Sinmun newspaper — the official mouthpiece of the ruling Workers’ Party — said the North’s forces were undeterred and called the US strike group’s imminent arrival “undisguised military blackmail”.
“Such threat may startle a jellyfish, but can never work on the DPRK,” it said Monday, using the country’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
A day earlier it said the North’s revolutionary forces were “combat-ready to sink the US nuclear aircraft carrier with a single strike”. Pyongyang’s rhetoric intensifies every spring, when the US and South Korea hold joint exercises it sees as rehearsals for an attack on the North.
A separate editorial on the North’s propaganda website Uriminzokkiri Monday claimed that the dispatching of the Carl Vinson signalled a war: “It is proof that an invasion of the North is nearing day by day.”
The editorial, described as being written by an army officer, said it was a “big miscalculation” for Washington to compare the North to Syria, which did not launch an “immediate counterattack” after a US cruise missile strike earlier this month.
In the event of an attack, it said, “The world will witness how Washington’s rash nuclear aircraft carriers are turned into a huge pile of steel and buried at sea and how a country called America is wiped out from the Earth.”
