North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is attending a key party meeting to discuss the nation's economy and defence strategies. The party conference discussed foreign policy in changed international situation on Friday, reports said.
The enlarged plenary meeting of the ruling Workers' Party's Central Committee came as the United States sent a nuclear-powered submarine to South Korea in the allies' latest show of force against the North, which has ramped up its testing of nuclear-capable missiles to a record pace in recent months.
According to reports, the naval forces of the US and South Korea are planning to conduct joint exercises focused on sharpening their special operation and joint combat capabilities.
North Korea condemned the joint military exercises and called it 'invasion rehearsals'. Pyongyang is using US-South Korean drills as a pretext to ramp up its own weapons demonstrations. North Korea has test-fired about 100 missiles since the start of 2022, The Guardian reported.
During the first day of meetings, officials reviewed the country's economic campaigns for the first half of 2023, and discussed foreign policy and defence strategies to cope with the changed international situation.
The arrival of the USS Michigan in the South Korean port of Busan on Friday, came a day after North Korea fired two short-range ballistic missiles into its eastern seas in response to US-South Korean live-fire drills that took place near the inter-Korean border this week.
Weapons tested by the North this year include a new solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile designed to reach the US mainland, and various shorter-range weapons targeting South Korea and Japan.
Experts say Kim's aggressive weapons push has put further strain on North Korea's isolated economy, which was already damaged by decades of mismanagement, crippling US-led sanctions over his nuclear weapons programme, and pandemic-related border closures that reduced trade with China, its main ally and economic lifeline.
Thursday's missile firings were North Korea's first rocket activity since May 31, when a long-range rocket carrying the country's first spy satellite crashed off the Korean Peninsula's west coast.
South Korea's Defence Ministry said Friday that military search crews have salvaged what it believes is part of the crashed North Korean rocket. The debris was to be analyzed by the US and South Korean militaries. The ministry released photos of the white, metal cylinder, which some experts said would have been the rocket's fuel tank.
(With PTI inputs.)
