The US president has warned that Pyongyang’s nuclear attack would “result in the end” of Kim Jong-un’s dictatorship.
A nuclear strike by North Korea against the US or South Korea, according to US President Joe Biden, would be catastrophic for Pyongyang. South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol stated that under a recent agreement between Washington and Seoul, the US would counter such an attack with nuclear weapons.
Biden told reporters at the White House that a nuclear assault by North Korea against the United States or one of its friends or partners would be unacceptable and bring an end to the government responsible.
Yoon said, in a joint statement with Biden, “sustainable peace on the Korean peninsula does not happen automatically.”
Yoon stated, “We can achieve peace through the superiority of overwhelming forces and not a false peace based on the goodwill of the other side,” and added that in the event of a nuclear attack from the north, the US and South Korea would “respond swiftly, overwhelmingly and decisively using the full force of the alliance, including US nuclear weapons.”
Those of Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, who threatened North Korea in 2017 with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” if the nation threatened the US with nuclear weapons, are echoed in Biden’s remarks. Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un agreed to a detente and met several times after that, and the north’s missile launches stopped for the most of Trump’s remaining time in office—despite the fact that the north detonated a nuclear weapon a month later.
Since then, these testing have resumed and intensified. Since the start of 2022, Pyongyang has tested more than 100 missiles, and last month it tested its first solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile and an undersea attack drone with nuclear weapons. Since last year, officials in Washington and Seoul have asserted that the north is preparing for its seventh nuclear weapon underground test.
Yoon’s predecessor, Moon Jae-in, broadly supported Trump’s approach to Kim from a diplomatic standpoint. Yoon, on the other hand, has adopted a much harder attitude toward his neighbor to the north. In a speech in January, Yoon mentioned the potential of his government getting “our own nuclear weapons,” which, according to recent polls, more than two thirds of South Koreans want.
That concept has been put to rest thanks to the deal made on Wednesday, which states that Seoul won’t pursue its own nuclear weaponry.
The ‘Washington Declaration’, which increases nuclear information exchange between the US and Korea, calls for increased cooperative military exercises and the rotational deployment of US bombers and submarines with nuclear weapons to South Korea.
