North Korea's Kim Jong Un makes claims of nuclear power, warheads
North Korea is taking its threats to new levels. Kim Jong-un claims his country has now developed a weapon that can create a radioactive tsunami. CNN's Brian Todd has the story. New information tonight on the North Korean strongman's brutality and his unrelenting ambition to threaten his enemies. With these photos showing tracks just under the surface, Kim Jong-un's regime claims to have tested an underwater drone capable of carrying Kim himself was photographed beaming next to a drone. North Korean state media says the mission of this weapon is to quote make a super scale radioactive tsunami to destroy enemy warships and ports. It claims this drone traveled underwater for nearly 60 hours, then detonated a warhead and blew up a mock enemy port.
Some analysts are skeptical of the real capability of this weapon. There's a lot we don't understand about how they're controlling this weapon, whether it's pre-programmed or whether they're actively maneuvering this thing underwater. And Ankit Panda says this drone would likely be vulnerable to being destroyed by the U.S. and South Korean navies before it flushes out to sea. But he says it could still be a threat. There's nothing preventing North Korea from in principle putting a nuclear device on an underwater vehicle like this and detonating it.
They could use it against massed formations of surface warships. In testing an underwater drone, Kim takes a page from Vladimir Putin's playbook. Russia claims to have developed a submarine-launched nuclear-powered underwater vehicle designed to strike enemy cities with nuclear weapons. But the Kremlin's offered no real proof of it. In recent days, Kim has apparently been successful in testing another menacing weapon. From mobile launchers, North Korea fired off long-range nuclear-capable cruise missiles. Eye-catching video shows the missiles hugging coastlines and mountains.
These aircraft fly fairly low, and if they will be nuclear armed, that's going to present, I think, a substantial challenge for missile defense in the morning in Northeast Asia. This comes as a new report from Human Rights Watchdog Group Korea Future details barbarous conditions inside Kim's network of prisons. What it says was a pattern of summary executions, torture, rape and starvation. At least one prisoner, it said, was forced to eat cockroaches and rodents to survive. A woman jailed for crossing the border into China, the report says, was forced to have an abortion when she was seven or eight months pregnant. Any drop of foreign blood dropped into North Korea is an offense to the Kim regime, and thus these poor ladies had relationships with Chinese men and were forcibly returned, are subjected to this criminal treatment. And that was CNN's Brian Todd.
North Korea's UN representative has not responded to allegations in the report.