North Korea’s leader stresses the need to strengthen his country’s naval nuclear deterrent

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un visited the naval destroyer Kang Geun to supervise a navigation test, the official Korean Central News Agency reported on Saturday, stressing the need to strengthen the navy’s ability to deter nuclear war.

This comes with Beijing and Pyongyang announcing that Chinese President Xi Jinping will visit North Korea between June 8 and 9, after Xi hosted two successive summits with US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin last month.

Kim has pledged in recent years to strengthen North Korea’s naval capabilities, and in May last year, he supervised the failed launch of the destroyer “Kang Geun”, which was later repaired and relaunched a month later.

During his trip on Thursday, Kim stressed the importance of rapidly developing the naval forces into a force “capable of reliably assuming responsibility for part of the nuclear war deterrence,” according to the official news agency.

Kim said building a naval fleet capable of dealing a “deadly blow” to enemies above and below water is a key goal of the ruling party’s current five-year defense development plan.

Pictures published by the agency showed that the North Korean leader visited the ship accompanied by senior officials and his daughter, Jo Ae.