Kim:Great Satisfaction of NKorea Tests

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- North Korea said Saturday that leader Kim Jong Un supervised another test-firing of an unspecified new weapon, seen as an attempt to pressure Washington and Seoul over slow nuclear negotiations and their joint military exercises.

Pyongyang's Korean Central News Agency, or KCNA, said that following Friday's launches, Kim expressed "great satisfaction" over his military's "mysterious and amazing success rates" in recent testing activity and vowed to build up "invincible military capabilities no one dare provoke." The report did not mention any specific comment about the United States or South Korea.


KCNA did not describe what Friday's weapons were or how they performed, but said that the tests were successful and strengthened the military's confidence in the reliability of the system.


"(Kim) said everyone should remember that it is the (ruling) party's core plan and unwavering determination to build a powerful force strong enough to discourage any forces from daring to provoke us and to leave any opponent defenseless against our Juche weapons of absolute power even in situations of physical clashes," KCNA said, referring to the North's national ideology of self-reliance.

In a separate statement on Saturday, KCNA berated the ongoing U.S.-South Korea military drills as an invasion rehearsal that compels North Korea to constantly develop "powerful physical means and their deployment for an actual war."




The U.S. envoy for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, will visit Japan and South Korea early next week for talks on how to "further strengthen coordination on the final, fully verified denuclearization" of North Korea, the U.S. State Department said.



Moon said in a televised speech on Thursday that momentum for dialogue remains alive despite the series of "worrying actions taken by North Korea recently" and called for Pyongyang to choose "economic prosperity over its nuclear program."

