North Korea Announces Deployment of ‘Special Assets’ Against South

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has announced the deployment of “special assets” in response to what he described as Washington’s military build-up in South Korea, state media reported on Sunday.

The United States currently stations approximately 28,500 troops in South Korea to deter potential military threats from the nuclear-armed North. Last month, it conducted a joint military exercise with South Korea and Japan.

Pyongyang routinely denounces such drills as rehearsals for invasion, while Washington and its allies insist they are purely defensive.

Speaking at the opening of a weapons exhibition in Pyongyang on Saturday, carried by the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), Kim said: “The US-ROK nuclear alliance is making rapid progress, and they are conducting various kinds of exercises to execute dangerous scenarios.”

He added: “In direct proportion to the US military’s arms buildup in the ROK region, our strategic concern about this region has also grown, and accordingly we have assigned our special assets to the major targets.”

Kim did not specify the nature of these special assets, but stated that he was closely monitoring military developments across the border.

“The enemy… will have to worry about which direction their security environment is moving in,” he said.

Photographs released by KCNA showed Kim walking past a range of weapons, including a missile, accompanied by senior North Korean generals at the exhibition.

Previous Diplomacy

• Kim last month indicated openness to talks with the United States, recalling “fond memories” of President Donald Trump.
• He emphasised that negotiations would be conditional on North Korea retaining its nuclear arsenal.
• Kim and Trump met three times during Trump’s first term, before talks collapsed in Hanoi in 2019 over disagreements on nuclear disarmament.

The US demand for North Korea to relinquish its banned weapons has long been a sticking point. Pyongyang has faced successive rounds of UN sanctions over its nuclear and missile programmes.

Since the 2019 summit failure, North Korea has repeatedly declared that it will never give up its atomic weapons, asserting that it is an “irreversible” nuclear state.