Seoul, South Korea CNN — North Korea will no longer seek reconciliation and reunification with South Korea, Kim Jong Un has declared, as his nation vowed to put three new military spy satellites into orbit in 2024.
Kim said inter-Korean relations had become “a relationship between two hostile countries and two belligerents at war,” the state-run news agency KCNA reported.
“It’s time for us to acknowledge the reality and clarify our relationship with the South,” Kim said, adding that if Washington and Seoul were to attempt a military confrontation with Pyongyang, its “nuclear war deterrent will not hesitate to take serious action.”
“I believe that it is a mistake that we must no longer make to deal with the people who declare us as ‘the main enemy’ and seek only opportunities for ‘[our] regime collapse’ and ‘unification by absorption’ by collaborating for reconciliation and unification,” Kim added.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“It’s time for us to acknowledge the reality and clarify our relationship with the South,” Kim said, adding that if Washington and Seoul were to attempt a military confrontation with Pyongyang, its “nuclear war deterrent will not hesitate to take serious action.”
Relations have ebbed and flowed over the decades but tensions have remained particularly high in more recent years after Kim Jong Un ramped up the country’s nuclear weapons program in defiance of international sanctions.
Last week, KCNA reported that Kim had instructed the country’s army, munitions industry, nuclear weapons and civil defense sectors to accelerate war preparations in response to “confrontation moves” by the US.
Pyongyang was keener to further relations instead with current allies like “China and Russia, and a selected network of countries around the world which will continue to enable its proliferation and financial outreach,” she added.
Ja Ian Chong, an associate professor of political science and nonresident scholar at Carnegie China, said Kim’s speech “reflects the reality that unification is not a short or even medium-term possibility (for the Koreas).”
“The North Korean threat is motivating greater trilateral cooperation among the US, Japan, and South Korea, including real-time sharing of missile tracking data.
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