The crisis in the Korean Peninsula appears to be entering a dangerous point as North Korea is beginning tests on mounting anthrax onto intercontinental ballistic missiles that would strike the United States (U.S.).
The move comes 48 hours after the White House’s U.S. National Security Strategy revealed that Kim Jong Un is eager to develop chemical and biological weapons.
The test by Pyongyang is to know if anthrax can endure immense heat and pressure when loaded into an ICBM and launched toward the earth’s atmosphere, Japan’s Asahi newspaper reported, citing an unidentified person connected to South Korea’s intelligence services.
“North Korea has started experiments such as heat and pressure equipment to prevent anthrax from dying even at a high temperature of over 7,000 degrees generated at the time of ICBM’s re-entry into the atmosphere,” the report stated.
“In part, there is unconfirmed information that it has already succeeded in such experiments.”
On Monday, the White House released its U.S. National Security Strategy that said North Korea is “pursuing chemical and biological weapons which could also be delivered by missile.”
Read also: Disgraced U.S. cardinal Bernard Law dies
“North Korea—a country that starves its own people—has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons that could threaten our homeland,” the document said.
North Korea vehemently denied the report and accused the U.S. of cooking “up untruths as truths” and using biological weapons during the Korean War.
“Properly speaking, it is the U.S. stereotyped method to cook up untruths as truths, stubbornly insisting that black is white and fabricating anything for satisfying their aggressive greed.
“The U.S. itself is an empire of evils full of plots, fabrications, lies and deceptions,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency stated.
It added, “It is none other than the U.S., chattering on ‘morality’ and ‘civilization,’ the criminal state that massacred the Korean people by bacteriological weapons during the Korean War and inflict sufferings upon the innocent people by continuing even now to openly use the internationally prohibited weapons.”
South Korea has long suspected North Korea was developing biological weapons.
A report by Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfar Center for Science and International Affairs stated the dictatorship may have “anthrax and smallpox” pathogens that could be turned into weapons.
North Korea is believed to have started its chemical and biological weapons programme in the early 1960s and began possibly weaponising biological agents in the 1980s, according to the report.
Kim Jong Un’s scientists launched its “greatest” ICBM in late November that the regime claimed could carry a “super-heavy nuclear warhead” that could strike “the whole mainland of the U.S.”
However, North Korea has yet to perfect its re-entry technology.
A U.S. official told Fox News the Hwasong-15 ICBM did not survive re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere.
