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President Yoon Suk-yeol of South Korea walks with President Joe Biden of the US along a corridor of the White House after their summit on April 26. (Yonhap)

North Korea has fiercely criticized the outcome of the Korea-US summit, calling President Yoon Suk-yeol a “top-class traitor obsessed with confrontation with fellow countrymen” and President Joe Biden of the US an “old man with no future.”

The Rodong Sinmun reported on April 30 that in a statement released through the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), Kim Yo-jong, a high-ranking Workers’ Party official and sister to leader Kim Jong-un, blasted the Washington Declaration between the Korean and American heads of state as “a typical product of their extreme anti-DPRK hostile policy.” DPRK is an acronym for North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Saying that the recent move by South Korea and the US “provides us with an environment in which we are compelled to take more decisive action,” Kim threatened, “The more the enemies are dead set on staging nuclear war exercises, and the more nuclear assets they deploy in the vicinity of the Korean peninsula, the stronger the exercise of our right to self-defence will become in direct proportion to them.”

“We are convinced once again of the fact that the enhancement of the nuclear war deterrent, especially the second mission of the nuclear war deterrent, should be brought to further perfection.” The “second mission of deterrence” refers to the second-strike capability.

In remarks at a joint press conference held after meeting Yoon on April 26 (local time), President Joe Biden of the US noted it was an avowed fact that any nuclear attack launched by North Korea would result in “the end of that regime.” Kim Yo-jong questioned if the remark could be attributed to “the man’s senility” and labeled it a “nonsensical remark from the person in his dotage,” calling Biden an “old man with no future.”

She also denigrated Yoon as “a fool.”

Kim Yo-jong’s statement was written on April 28 and initially released through KCNA on Saturday, only two days after the Korea-US summit, while Yoon’s visit to the US had not yet finished. This was the first official reaction from North Korean authorities.

A commentary attributed to the Korean Central News Agency in the Rodong Sinmun on Sunday also slammed Yoon’s visit to the US as “the most hostile, aggressive and provocative trip and a dangerous one for a nuclear war.”

The piece then used the terms “puppet traitor” and “top-class traitor obsessed with confrontation with fellow countrymen” in reference to Yoon. With regard to Biden’s remark on the “end of the regime,” the KCNA called it a “frantic and reckless” comment that revealed “the falsity and impudence of the gibberish about ‘dialogue.’”

The South Korean Ministry of Unification pushed back against Kim Yo-jong’s remarks, stating, “This reflects North Korea’s anxiousness and frustration over the groundbreaking bolstering of nuclear deterrence in the South Korea-US alliance,” calling the comments an “overreaction and insolent opinion that shows the crudeness of North Korea.”

By Lee Je-hun, senior staff writer

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