North Korea: North Korea holds important talks while the United States sends a nuclear submarine to South Korea
By Ahmad Hadizat Omayoza, Mamos Nigeria
According to reports from state media, North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, opened a political conference. The purpose of the event was to talk about how to improve the country’s struggling economy and look at its defense plans in light of growing tensions with rivals.
The United States sent a nuclear-powered submarine to South Korea during the expanded plenary meeting of the central committee of the ruling Workers’ Party. This was the allies’ most recent show of force against the North, which has increased its testing of nuclear-capable missiles at an unprecedented rate in recent months.
Prior to his trip to China, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin. The two of them talked about relations between China and South Korea, bilateral relations, and North Korea.
In a statement that was made public by the foreign ministry of South Korea, Blinken and Park vehemently opposed what they deemed to be North Korea’s series of provocations. They agreed that the United States, South Korea, and Japan should continue to push China to be an active participant in the UN Security Council’s discussion of denuclearization.
According to the official Korean Central News Agency of North Korea, party officials reviewed the country’s economic campaigns for the first half of 2023 and discussed strategies for foreign policy and defense to “cope with the changed international situation” on Friday’s first day of meetings.
The KCNA didn’t say what was discussed or say anything about Kim’s comments. It stated that the meeting would last at least another day.
The USS Michigan arrived in the South Korean port of Busan on Friday, a day after North Korea responded to US-South Korean live fire drills near the inter-Korean border this week by firing two short-range ballistic missiles into its eastern seas.
Plans have been made for joint combat and special operations training exercises between the US and South Korean navies.
Pyongyang has branded the joint exercises of the allies as invasion rehearsals. Since the beginning of 2022, North Korea has tested-fired approximately 100 missiles and used the expanding US-South Korean drills as a pretext to ramp up its own weapons demonstrations.
Experts say that Kim’s aggressive weapons push has increased the strain on North Korea’s isolated economy, which was already hurt by decades of poor management, crippling sanctions imposed by the US over his nuclear weapons program, and pandemic-related border closures that reduced trade with China, North Korea’s main ally and economic lifeline.
