One day after North Korea threatened the U.S. with a preemptive nuclear missile strike, leader Kim Jong-un alerted the country's troops to "prepare for war" Friday, encouraging them to attack first if tensions "boil over".
As Kim visited soldiers on the country's shared border with South Korea, he reportedly instructed them to "annihilate the enemy", according to The Independent. Kim "stressed the need for the soldiers to keep themselves fully ready to go into action to annihilate the enemy any time an order is issued and instructed them to deal deadly blows at the enemies and blow up their positions," North Korean state media said Friday, The Telegraph reported.
The United Nations voted unanimously Thursday to approve tougher sanctions against North Korea as punishment for the country's third nuclear missile test launch in February, stoking the ire of North Korea, who described America as a "criminal threatening global peace" just hours before the U.N.'s vote. Pyongyang has since announced its withdrawal from the armistice it reached with South Korea, which ended the Korean war in 1953. Kim has cancelled the peace treaty and closed his country's side of the shared border with South Korea, according to CBS News.
China, North Korea's only major ally, was swift to condemn the country's nuclear missile tests, and voted with the U.S. for harsher U.N. sanctions, but remains noncommittal in its rhetoric.
"China and North Korea have normal country relations. At the same time, we also oppose North Korea's conducting of nuclear tests," a spokesman for China Foreign Ministry said Friday.
"China calls on the relevant parties to be calm and exercise restraint and avoid taking any further action that would cause any further escalations."
The most recently approved U.N sanctions will "broaden and tighten" the many current financial, economic and trade sanctions that have been in effect against Pyongyang since 2006, and will outright ban the sale of luxuries such as yachts and sports cars in the country, highly cherished toys of North Korea's "ruling elite", according to NBC News. Some of the measures will also seek to stymie North Korea's ability to move its money around the world, and finance and gather material for its weapons programs.
"Taken together, these sanctions will bite, and bite hard," said Susan E. Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, The Washington Post reported. "The strength, breadth and severity of these sanctions will raise the cost to North Korea of its illicit nuclear program and further constrain its ability to finance and source materials and technology for its ballistic missile, conventional and nuclear weapons programs."
North Korea has been wrestling with the threat of further sanctions ever since launching the country's third nuclear missile test last month. The test was the nation's largest and most powerful launch to date,according to Reuters. The "explosion-like" nuclear missile test launch produced a seismic magnitude about twice the size of a 2009 test, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty Organization said at a news conference. North Korea claimed the missile test was just the "first response" to threats from the U.S., and vowed it would move forward with "second and third measures of greater intensity" if America remains hostile toward the nation, USA Today reported.
This is far from the first time North Korea has lobbed a threat at the U.S. The insular nation denounced the U.S. as its "sworn enemy" and announced more nuclear tests earlier in January in retaliation for the United Nations Security Council's unanimous decision to tighten sanctions in the nation. Some experts on the country and its history with nuclear warfare believe the recent aggression is nothing more than propaganda.
Gordon Chang, author of "Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes On The World", said he considered North Korea's threat nothing more than "saber rattling," according to Yahoo News.
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