North Korea says it carried out its first-ever nuclear counterattack drills on Monday.
The state-run Korean Central News Agency said Tuesday that leader Kim Jong Un supervised the drills of its nuclear weapons management and control system, which it calls its “nuclear trigger.”
The drills included the firing of several “super-large” artillery rockets fitted with mock nuclear warheads from multiple rocket launcher units.
KCNA says the rockets flew about 352 kilometers before successfully hitting an island target, and that Kim expressed “satisfaction” over the results.
South Korean and Japanese military officials both confirmed Monday that North Korea had fired several short-range ballistic missiles into the waters off the peninsula’s east coast.
KCNA says the drills were carried out in response to current joint air defense drills by U.S. and South Korean forces, which it denounced as threatening to the regime.
Monday’s drills were conducted just days after North Korea reportedly tested a so-called “super-large” warhead designed to be launched on a cruise missile.
Meanwhile, South Korea’s national police agency said several domestic defense firms have been the targets of three North Korean-based cyberhacking groups.
The agency says the hacking groups, dubbed Lazarus, Kimsuky and Andariel, have breached the firms’ internal networks since 2022 and stolen confidential technical data.
The hackers managed to breach the companies’ networks by implanting malicious codes or obtaining email and password information from employees at subcontractors who used the same passwords for both their private and official email accounts.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse.
