North Korea, Which Regularly Threatens to Nuke U.S., Condemns Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’

Kim Jong Un, North Korea's leader, watches an honor guard before his departure to North Ko
Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The communist regime of North Korea published an outraged screed on Tuesday denouncing President Donald Trump’s plan to implement a “Golden Dome” missile defense system over the United States, and potentially other parts of North America.

President Trump campaigned throughout 2024 on investing in a missile defense system covering the entire United States designed to protect America from the threat of hypersonic, ballistic, and other advanced missiles, referring to it as akin to Israel’s “Iron Dome” system. A week after taking office for his second term, Trump issued an executive order requiring a plan from the incoming secretary of defense within 60 days for a missile defense architecture of this type.

The White House announced last week that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had indeed selected an architecture for the missile defense system, called the “Golden Dome.” President Trump described the system as featuring “next-generation technologies across the land, sea, and space, including space-based sensors and interceptors” and indicated that the scope of the project is so large that the government of Canada is also interested in participating in the project.

Mention of Canada placed leftist Prime Minister Mark Carney, who campaigned almost single-mindedly on severing Canada’s ties with the United States, in an uncomfortable position. Carney confirmed that his government was indeed interested in cooperating with Trump, who was more the focus of his campaign than his conservative rival, but stated that Canada was “in a position now where we cooperate when necessary, but not necessarily cooperate.”

In his announcement, Trump described the Golden Dome as defending North America from threats around the globe.

“Once fully constructed, the Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world,” Trump told reporters, “and even if they are launched from space, and we will have the best system ever built.”

Several anti-American regimes on the other side of the world took offense to the announcement, most prominently the Communist Party of China, which accused the United States of pursuing a system with “clear offensive implications” that could “heighten the risk of space militarization.” North Korea’s Foreign Ministry joined its close allies in Beijing in condemning the news on Tuesday, claiming Trump was bringing the world closer to an “outer space nuclear war scenario.”

The Foreign Ministry opined in a “memorandum” out of its American Studies department released on Monday, according to the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the flagship propaganda network of the North Korean government. The Kim dynasty has for decades outlawed the consumption of any media made outside of North Korea, meaning outlets such as KCNA are the only forms of broadcasting news that the general public in the country can legally access.

The “Golden Dome” plan, Pyongyang objected, was a “typical product of ‘America first,’ the height of self-righteousness, arrogance, high-handed and arbitrary practice.” The plan “is an outer space nuclear war scenario supporting the U.S. strategy for unipolar domination with the preemptive establishment of the outer space-based military substructure,” the screed continued.

KCNA paraphrased the Foreign Ministry as categorically stating, without providing evidence and in direct contradiction of the White House announcement, that the “Golden Dome” was “aimed at the preemptive strike at sovereign states.”

“Under the pretext of defending its mainland, it has been hell-bent on building a missile defense system targeting the independent sovereign states including the DPRK [North Korea],” the Foreign Ministry railed.

Absent from the criticism out of Pyongyang was the fact that North Korea remains one of the top threats to the American mainland that the Golden Dome could potentially counter, as the regime has been threatening to launch a nuclear missile strike against the United States for over a decade. In 2013, for example, two years into the reign of current dictator Kim Jong-un, North Korea published a propaganda video apparently showing incinerated American cities in the aftermath of a North Korean nuclear attack.

”]

North Korea similarly declared itself ready to destroy America with a nuclear attack in 2015 and 2016.

“In response to the U.S. frenzied hysteria for unleashing a nuclear war, we have fully transferred our army from the form of military response to the form of delivering a pre-emptive strike,” then-Foreign Minister Lee Su-yong said in a public statement, “and we state resolutely about the readiness to deliver a pre-emptive nuclear strike.”

More recently, North Korean officials, including Kim, threatened a “black augury of total destruction” in the event America made a “wrong decision” and suggested that the presence of a U.S. nuclear-powered submarine in South Korea could be a trigger to a nuclear attack.

North Korea has invested heavily in intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) systems, some of which could potentially reach any part of the U.S. mainland according to expert analysts. The most recent model Pyongyang publicly debuted, in November 2024, is the “Hwasong-19,” which South Korean and Japanese officials documented to have flown about 4,300 miles high during a test launch.

Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.

Để lại một bình luận

Email của bạn sẽ không được hiển thị công khai. Các trường bắt buộc được đánh dấu *