11 August
North Korea warned Sunday that it would reject contact with the South as long as Seoul continues its joint military drill with the United States, which Pyongyang has condemned as a rehearsal for an invasion.
North Korea's state-run media reported that leader Kim Jong Un presided over the test-firing of a new weapon on Saturday, the day the South said Pyongyang launched two projectiles believed to be short-range ballistic missiles toward the Sea of Japan. In a statement carried Sunday by the official Korean Central News Agency, Kwon Jong Gun, director general of the Foreign Ministry's Department of American Affairs, said the two Koreas "now stand in an extraordinary situation."
"Given that the military exercise clearly puts us as an enemy in its concept, they should think that an inter-Korean contact itself will be difficult," unless they put an end to the exercise, Kwon said. North Korea has carried out five rounds of weapons launches in just over two weeks, saying it was meant as a warning to the United States and South Korea over their ongoing joint military drill that began last Monday. Kwon argued that U.S. President Donald Trump has accepted Pyongyang's firing of short-range missiles.
"With regard to our test for developing the conventional weapons, even the U.S. president made a remark which in effect recognizes the self-defensive rights of a sovereign state, saying that it is a small missile test which a lot of countries do," Kwon said. The North Korean senior official, meanwhile, criticized the South which he says believes "the building of our self-defensive armed forces" is causing military tension, adding, "How can the South Korean authorities...say such nonsense?" Projectiles were fired Saturday from North Korea's South Hamgyong Province at 5:34 a.m. and 5:50 a.m., flying about 400 kilometers while reaching an altitude of about 48 km, the South said.
Later in the day, however, Trump said in a Twitter post that Kim expressed his desire, in what the U.S. president called a "beautiful" letter, to hold more summit talks as soon as the U.S.-South Korea joint military exercises are over. Trump also wrote that Kim offered "a small apology for testing short-range missiles," without elaborating, adding that the letter said missile testing "would stop when the (U.S.-South Korea) exercises end" on Aug. 20.
In a June 30 meeting at the inter-Korean truce village of Panmunjeom, Trump and Kim made an agreement to resume denuclearization negotiations and invited each other to visit their capital cities.-Kyodo
