North Korea promises more spy satellite launches after failed 1st attempt
Global News
Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, accused the U.S. of "gangster-like" hypocrisy for criticizing her country's failed launch on Wednesday.
The powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Thursday accused the United States of “gangster-like” hypocrisy for criticizing her country’s failed launch of a military spy satellite and insisted that the North will follow with a successful launch soon.
Kim Yo Jong said North Korea’s efforts to acquire space-based reconnaissance capabilities were a legitimate exercise of its sovereign right and restated the country’s rejection of U.N. Security Council resolutions that ban it from conducting any launch involving ballistic missile technology.
Her comments on state media came a day after a North Korean long-range rocket carrying its first developed spy satellite lost thrust after a stage separation and crashed in waters off the Korean Peninsula’s western coast.
After an unusually quick admission of failure, North Korea vowed to conduct a second launch soon after determining what went wrong as leader Kim Jong Un pushes to expand his military capabilities amid a prolonged freeze in diplomacy with the United States.
The North’s launch was swiftly criticized by Washington and its allies Seoul and Tokyo. Adam Hodge, a spokesperson at the U.S. National Security Council, said in a statement that Washington strongly condemns the North Korean launch because it used banned ballistic missile technology, raised tensions and risked destabilizing security in the region and beyond.
In her statement, Kim Yo Jong briefly mentioned Hodge’s comments before saying the United States “is letting loose a hackneyed gibberish prompted by its brigandish and abnormal thinking.”
“If the DPRK’s satellite launch should be particularly censured, the U.S. and all other countries, which have already launched thousands of satellites, should be denounced. This is nothing but sophism of self-contradiction,” she said, using the initials of North Korea’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
She noted how the United States closely monitors the North through its own reconnaissance satellites and other aerial assets, calling the Americans a “group of gangsters” who would deem it as “illegal and threatening” had North Korea attempted to send a satellite into space by balloon.