New Delhi: In a New Year’s Day speech, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un had cautioned the Trump administration saying that a “nuclear button” was on his desk and United States is “within the range of our nuclear strike.”
Responding back to this threat President Trump asserted on Tuesday that his “nuclear button” is “much bigger & more powerful” than the North Korean leader’s and threatening that the U.S. arsenal “works.”
The president has been locked in an increasingly bitter war of words with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Trump had also threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea and mocked its leader, Kim Jong-un, as “Rocket Man” on a suicide mission for test launches of ballistic missiles and for nuclear weapon tests. Kim has called Trump a ‘mentally deranged U.S. dotard’.
South Korea has proposed holding talks with North Korea next week in Panmunjom, a village straddling the border between the two hostile countries. If North Korea agrees, it would be the first official dialogue between the Koreas in two years.
However, the US envoy to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, has distanced the Trump administration from proposed contacts between North and South Korea, saying it would not take any talks seriously until and unless Pyongyang abandon its nuclear arsenal.
North Korea has achieved significant success in the past year in developing intercontinental ballistic missiles that could eventually deliver nuclear warheads to targets as distant as the United States.
So far, every effort to persuade the North to back off from its fast-developing nuclear and missile programs have. Last year, the rogue state detonated a nuclear bomb five times more powerful than the weapon dropped on Hiroshima.
In his Tuesday tweet, Trump wrote: “Sanctions and ‘other’ pressures are beginning to have a big impact on North Korea. Soldiers are dangerously fleeing to South Korea. Rocket man now wants to talk to South Korea for first time. Perhaps that is good news, perhaps not – we will see!”
