North Korea: UN needs to discuss US-South Korea drills
North Korea wants to take its complaints about U.S. and South Korean military exercises to the U.N. Security Council, saying the annual manoeuvrs are recklessly provocative at a time when tensions are “like a time bomb” — a message delivered as the North continued launching missiles.
A letter from North Korea’s U.N. ambassador, Ja Song Nam, dated Friday and released Monday, asked Egypt as Security Council president to schedule a discussion urgently.
It’s like adding “fuel to open fire” that the U.S. is staging a “provocative and aggressive joint military exercise at this critical moment of the Korean Peninsula, where the situation is just like a time bomb” that nobody is sure “when to blow up,” he wrote.
It was not clear whether his request for a discussion would be granted, or indeed whether other countries might seek a meeting in light of North Korea’s most recent missile tests Saturday and Tuesday. The latest, which unfolded while it was still Monday at U.N. headquarters, sent a ballistic missile over Japan and then into the Pacific Ocean.