Kim Jong-un shows the muscles. Thursday, March 9, during a missile firing exercise, attended by his daughter Ju-Ae, considered by some analysts to be the future heiress of the regime, the North Korean leader ordered his army to reinforce its military maneuvers for a “real war”. North Korea must “regularly intensify the various real war simulation exercises, in a diversified way and in different situations”, he said, in remarks reported by the official KCNA agency. As he supervised the firing exercise, he instructed the soldiers to prepare for “two strategic missions: first, to deter war and, second, to initiate war”.
Images released by KCNA on Friday March 10 showed the simultaneous launch of six missiles by the Hwasong unit, trained for “strike missions”adding that the unit “fired a powerful salvo (of missiles) at the targeted waters of the West Korean Sea”. The day before, the South Korean army announced that it had detected the launch of a short-range ballistic missile towards the sea off its west coast, fired from the port city of Nampo, south of Pyongyang.