North Korean leader praises 'great success' of nukes
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Friday celebrated the "great success" of his illicit nuclear weapons program at the first congress of the country's Workers' Party in 30 years.
"Unprecedented results have been accomplished" with a nuclear test in January and the launch of a satellite into space in February, Kim told his party members and invited guests from mostly Asian countries in the capital Pyongyang, according to The (South) Korea Times, which cited the North's government mouthpiece, the Korean Central News Agency.
The congress comes amid growing tension on the Korean Peninsula about the North's weapons tests, which included a missile capable of reaching parts of the U.S. mainland and a test of what North Korea claimed was its first hydrogen bomb. South Korean President Park Geun Hye has disclosed that the South, together with the United States, is developing contingency plans in case of a collapse of the North's regime, with strategies to seize and secure nuclear facilities and materials.
The two allies are also in talks on the deployment of one of the most advanced missile defense systems in the world, the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, to South Korea.
The United Nations Security Council has imposed tough new economic sanctions on North Korea in hopes it will roll back a weapons program that violates the North's obligations under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
The dictator called the bomb test the "the first H-bomb test... an historic landmark in the 5,000-year history of our people," but U.S. experts believe the blast was too small to be a real hydrogen bomb.
KCNA also issued a statement Friday from the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea to explain the rationale of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea for developing a nuclear capability.
"The DPRK did so because of the U.S. and its followers' open nuclear threat to the DPRK," the statement said.
"We would like to re-clarify that the DPRK's nuclear weapons are the deterrent means for defending the nation and the country but not those for getting recognition and approval by someone," the statement said. North Korea will remain a nuclear weapons state "regardless of whether one recognizes it or not," it said.
More than 100 foreign journalists were invited to North Korea to cover the party congress, but they were barred from the April 25 House of Culture, where the event is being held, according to the BBC. Instead, they were taken on a tour of a wire-making factory.
Some analysts believe the advances on the weapons program gives Kim the leeway to chart a new path of engagement with South Korea that would ease tensions and improve the prospects for economic development and foreign aid.
A policy of simultaneous development of both the economy and nuclear weapons would replace the "military first" policy of his father, Kim Jong Il, who died in 2011, according to Robert E. Kelly, professor of political science at Pusan National University in South Korea.
“The congress is intended to revive the party and roll back the military. Songun has bankrupted North Korea and made it permanently dependent on China,” Kelly said. “This could be good for the United States because it could mean less money for the Korean Peoples’ Army. That would also be good news for North Koreans because resources would be freed up from the military that could go to the civilian sector,” Kelly said.
North Korea is one of the world's most repressive and reclusive states and is among the world's worst violators of human rights, according to the U.S. State Department and Human Rights Watch. Its citizens are denied the freedoms of speech, press, assembly, association, religion, movement and worker rights, according to the State Department. Defectors report extrajudicial killings, disappearances, arbitrary detention, torture and systematic forced labor, according to State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2015, which came out last month.
Contributing: Kirk Spitzer