North Korea will defy sanctions “for a 1,000 years”, a senior Pyongyang official said, as he shrugged off rising anxiety in Japan following his country’s latest provocative missile test.
N orth Korea will defy sanctions “for a 1,000 years”, a senior Pyongyang official said, as he shrugged off rising anxiety in Japan following his country’s latest provocative missile tes t.
In a rare media briefing to a handful of reporters in Beijing only hours after Pyongyang fired an intermediate ballistic missile over Japan, the official also warned of the growing “power” of the North’s military.
North Korea has defied a series of UN sanctions with increasingly provocative tests, including the detonation of what it claimed to be a hydrogen bomb earlier this month and the firing of two missiles over Japan, a close US ally.
The latest launch on Friday saw a furious response from Washington which called on Russia and China to do more to economically squeeze the nuclear-armed state.
But Choe Kang-il, deputy director general for North American affairs at the North’s foreign ministry, said: “You can impose whatever sanctions you want, but no matter how long these sanctions last – whether it is for a hundred or a thousand years – we will keep stepping up efforts and continue with our planned tests.
