A day after North Korea fired 25 short-range rockets into the sea off its east coast, state media on Monday depicted Kim Jong Un overseeing an air force exercise, exhorting his fighter pilots to embrace “the spirit of becoming human bombs”.
The North Korean military exercises coincide with large-scale annual joint drills by South Korean and US forces, which Pyongyang has fiercely opposed as in previous years. “The acute situation is prevailing on the Korean peninsula in which a war may break out anytime,” an editorial in the Rodong Sinmun newspaper said on Sunday. “This is entirely attributable to the US persistent hostile policy toward the DPRK to stifle it by force of arms.”
The warnings of imminent conflict echo Pyongyang’s dramatic talk of nuclear war around this time last year, which attracted global media attention. However, this year’s admonitions have been more moderate in both wording and frequency, while the missile launches have drawn only perfunctory protests from officials in Seoul and Washington.