CNN
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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un plans to build the “world’s most powerful” nuclear force, state news agency KCNA reported on Sunday.
The “ultimate goal” behind North Korea’s nuclear program was to possess “absolute strength, unprecedented in the century,” Kim said Saturday as part of a promotion order for dozens of military officers, the agency reported.
The order comes after what North Korea said was a “test firing of a new type” of intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) on November 18.
The missile was a Hwaseong-17, according to KCNA, a huge rocket theoretically capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to the continental United States.
Kim praised the officials who developed the new missile in his remarks.
He called the missile “the world’s strongest strategic weapon” and said it represented “a marvelous advance in the development of technology for mounting nuclear warheads on ballistic missiles.”
With the development of the new intercontinental ballistic missile, Kim said North Korea had shown the world “the confident and ever-victorious future of our state as it moves towards the goal of building the world’s strongest military.”
In a letter sent to Kim recently, scientists at the North Korean Academy of Defense Sciences said the test firings marked a “great historic victory” for the country and demonstrated North Korea’s sovereignty.
Kim himself attended the launch with a girl believed to be his daughter, Ju Ae.
Pyongyang also posted video of the missile launch, only the third time it has done so since 2017, according to Ankit Panda, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s nuclear policy program.
While the test showed that Pyongyang can launch a large ICBM and keep it airborne for more than an hour, North Korea has yet to demonstrate the ability to place a warhead on top of a long-range ballistic missile, projectiles that fire shoot into space it is capable of surviving the ferocious re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.
But analysts say that with repeated testing, the North Koreans are refining their capabilities.
