North Korea pledges to expand military drills, scale up war readiness posture
Hosting a weighty military meeting, North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Un, has vowed to ramp up the scope of the county's military drills and enhance its preparedness for war.
The country's media made the announcement early Tuesday after Kim chaired the meeting of the Central Military Commission of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea.
Officials discussed "major military and political tasks" for this year and the "long-term issues concerning the orientation for army building," the official Korean Central News Agency, KCNA, reported.
"Studied and discussed there were...the issue of constantly expanding and intensifying the operation and combat drills of the KPA (Korean People's Army) to cope with the prevailing situation and more strictly perfecting the preparedness for war," KCNA said.
The meeting came ahead of North Korea's widely expected military parade to mark the founding anniversary of its armed forces on Wednesday.
Earlier this week, Pyongyang reiterated its condemnation of joint military drills featuring South Korea, Japan and the United States.
The drills, it said, had reached an "extreme red line" and threatened to turn the Korean Peninsula into a "huge war arsenal and a more critical war zone."
Pyongyang also condemned a visit to South Korea by US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
Austin had said earlier alongside his South Korean counterpart that the two countries sought to reinforce their regular military maneuvers by fielding more "strategic assets" such as aircraft carriers and long-range bombers.
North Korea has said it is not interested in dialogue as long as Washington pursues hostile policies.
US President Joe Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, took unprecedented steps towards apparently fraternizing the North by initiating several rounds of dialogue with it, and even walking a number of steps into the country alongside Kim.
However, Washington blew what Pyongyang called a golden opportunity at mending the situation by insisting too much on the North’s denuclearization. The emphasis prompted Pyongyang to discredit all the steps that had been taken by Trump as ingenuine and go back to its fiery discourse towards Washington.
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