North Korea said on Friday morning that it tested a “nuclear submarine warfare drone” this week during a joint U.S.-South Korean military exercise, in response to state-run Korean Central News Agency media.
The brand new underwater weapon is designed to “secretly infiltrate operational waters” and attack naval strike groups and enemy ports, North Korea claims.
“This nuclear underwater attack drone will be deployed to any coast and port or towed by a surface vessel for operations,” KCNA said in a press release. A test warhead exploded within the waters off Hongwon Bay on Thursday afternoon, North Korea said.
The weapons test got here as the USA and South Korea concluded Freedom Shield 23, a series of military exercises across the Korean peninsula that began on March 11. The USA, India, Japan, Canada and South Korea also launched Sea Dragon 23 last week, an anti-submarine exercise within the Indo-Pacific region.
North Korea attacked “the US imperialists and the traitor South Korean puppet regime” for the exercise, saying that the political situation on the Korean peninsula is at an “irreversibly dangerous point.”
![Underwater drill conducted in North Korea.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/north-korea-attack-drone-295.jpg?w=900)
![Kim Jong Un](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/north-korea-attack-drone-292.jpg?w=900)
“The war scenario of hostile forces against the DPRK, based on the deployment of massive nuclear strategic assets, the variety of forces involved in carrying it out, and the resulting special mode of war, urgently requires the DPRK’s entire armed forces to organize for all-out war,” state officials said. media in Pyongyang.
North Korea also fired multiple strategic cruise missiles from South Hamgyong province on Wednesday.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, US Army General Mark Milley told Congress on Thursday that China stays “a very powerful long-term geostrategic challenge to US security,” but noted that North Korea can be a serious threat within the region.
“North Korea’s continued ballistic missile testing and nuclear weapons development pose an actual threat to our homeland in addition to allies and partners within the Indo-Pacific,” Milley told the House Appropriations Committee.