North Korea has threatened to destroy Japan with nuclear weapons and “reduce the US mainland to ashes and darkness” in response to the countries’ effort to ramp up sanctions on the isolated east Asian nation.
“The four islands of the [Japanese] archipelago should be sunken into the sea by the nuclear bomb of Juche,” the country’s Asia-Pacific Peace Committee said in a statement carried by state news agency KCNA. “Japan is no longer needed to exist near us.”
Juche, or “self-reliance”, is the official ideology of North Korea, originally crafted in the 1950s by founding father Kim Il Sung — grandfather of the current supreme leader, Kim Jong Un.