North Korea has revealed its plans to strike
targets in Hawaii and the continental United States in photos taken in Kim
Jong-un's military command centre.
The photos appeared in the state-run Rodong newspaper and were apparently taken at an "emergency meeting" early on Friday morning. They show Kim signing the order for North Korea's strategic rocket forces to be on standby to fire at US targets, the paper said, with large-scale maps and diagrams in the background.
The images show a chart marked "US mainland
strike plan" and missile trajectories that the NK News web site estimates
terminate in Hawaii, Washington DC, Los Angeles and what they claim is Austin,
Texas.
The meeting of Pyongyang's senior military leaders
was called after two US B2 bombers, flying out of bases in Missouri, carried
out simulated bombing raids on North Korean targets on an island off the coast
of South Korea.
"He finally signed the plan on technical
preparations of strategic rockets, ordering them to be on standby to fire so
that they may strike any time the US mainland, its military bases in the
operational theatres in the Pacific, including Hawaii and Guam, and those in
South Korea," the state-run KCNA news agency reported.
It added
that the B2 test flights demonstrated Washington's "hostile intent"
and said the "reckless" act had gone "beyond the phase of threat
and blackmail."
The North's military was placed on its highest
alert level earlier this week and a hotline link with the South Korean military
was severed.
North Korea has also cut the mobile Internet link
for foreign visitors, only weeks after the 3G service was introduced.
Despite the
increasingly belligerent rhetoric and new images emerging from the North Korean
regime, analysts believe its missiles are not capable of striking targets as
far away as the US mainland and are not, as yet, capable of delivering a
nuclear payload.
The images of Kim surrounded by his officers and
diagrams of targets in the US are designed for a domestic consumption and to
demonstrate the young leader's mastery of military affairs, experts believe.
By Julian Ryall, The Telegraph
