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North korean missiles are displayed during a parade at Kim Il Sung Square in Pyongyang

The North Korean military has openly threatened to carry out a preemptive strike on the Blue House and US military bases in Osan, Pyeongtaek (in Gyeonggi Province) and Gunsan, North Jeolla Province. North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Han Song-ryol also said that North Korea would go to war if the US wants one. Rumors continued to swirl in the US on Apr. 14 about a preemptive strike on the North. The “war of words” between the US and North Korea is moving toward a crescendo.

“An extremely grave situation is forming on the Korean Peninsula right now because of the rash military provocations and lunacy of the new Trump administration in the US,” the spokesperson for the General Staff Department of the Korean People’s Army said in a statement released late in the afternoon of Apr. 14, the Korean Central News Agency reported. “North Korea will immediately make its own kind of appropriate super-hardline response according to the kind and the intensity of the American provocation. This includes a number of options, including an unexpected preemptive strike in the North Korean style, which includes mobility on the ground, in the ocean, in the water and in the air,” the spokesperson said.

North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Han Song-Ryol

“The North Korean military and people always maintain a state of complete readiness to make every super-hardline response, including a nuclear strike. We do not conceal the fact that all of the bases of evil, including the Blue House, and American bases in South Korea such as those at Osan, Gunsan and Pyeongtaek will be razed to the ground in the space of a few minutes.”

“It is necessary to bear in mind that all American bases throughout the Pacific region, including those on Guam, Okinawa and the Japanese main island, are within the sights of our strategic rocket forces,” North Korea also emphasized. The spokesperson for the General Staff Department said in the statement that they had been instructed to release the statement, suggesting that the instructions had come from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

During an exclusive interview with the Associated Press in Pyongyang on the morning of Apr. 14, North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Han Song-ryol said that if the US rashly attempts to carry out a military provocation, North Korea would move first to carry out a preemptive strike. “We will go to war” if the US makes that choice, Han said. He added that the sixth nuclear test was a decision to be made by the North Korean leadership, and that if the leadership decided a test was necessary, it would carry out that test at a time and place of its choosing.

The reason North Korea is openly declaring its super-hardline plans before North Korean founder Kim Il-sung’s 105th birthday on Apr. 15, the North’s most important holiday, is apparently because it has settled on a stance of head-on resistance to the series of hardline actions taken by the Trump administration, including the deployment of the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier to the area around the Korean Peninsula.

The US continued piling military pressure on North Korea on Apr. 14. “The US has positioned two destroyers capable of shooting Tomahawk cruise missiles in the region, one just 300 miles from the North Korean nuclear test site,” reported NBC News, quoting senior American intelligence officials.

NBC News reported that the White House is considering launching a preemptive strike against North Korea – which has never happened before – if American intelligence officials are convinced that a North Korean nuclear weapon test is imminent.

By Jung In-hwan, staff reporter

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