North Korea on Tuesday slammed President Trump for his plans to create the Golden Dome missile defense system.
Officials in Pyongyang dubbed the effort “the height of self-righteousness, arrogance, high-handed and arbitrary practice” read a memorandum issued by the Institute for American Studies, according to state media.
The country now joins Russia and China in their critique of the United States’ outer space defense system, projected by Trump to cost $175 billion.
The Golden Dome model is expected to mirror Israel’s Iron Dome, intercepting scheduled strikes from near and far in the outer space realm. North Korea’s leaders have skirted the idea that the project’s development stems from the threat of war but seeks to provoke a nuclear war instead.
“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 [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea]. Clear is the reason why the U.S. is scheming to freeze the so-called ‘threat’ from sovereign states as a pretext for modernizing its missile defense system, persistently spinning out the time-worn sophism just like a guilty party filing the suit first,” the memorandum read.
“It is to preemptively attain military superiority in an all-round way by justifying its hegemony-oriented moves for space arms buildup and accelerating outer space militarization behind the screen of ‘mainland defence’ and to launch the military strike at its enemy states at its will by relying on it,” it added.
The Trump administration said the system would take three years to build, culminating at the end of the president’s second term. However, experts have doubted its completion in the short timeline, suggesting the Golden Dome’s development would need significant extensions and bipartisan support.
“We will not have space-based interceptors in three years,” Melanie Marlowe, a senior associate with the Center for Strategic and International Studies’s Missile Defense Project, previously told The Hill.
“That is a very challenging and expensive problem to solve. But if we start moving quickly, we can make good progress on getting missiles, radars, and satellite constellations in that time frame,” she added.
In response to the upscaled U.S. military effort, North Korea has vowed to ramp up its security with strengthened defense measures.
“The global security environment, which is becoming uncertain due to the U.S. undisguised moves for space militarization, proves that the security of the state and the region can be reliably guaranteed only by the symmetry of the matchless power capable of firmly bringing not only the current challenges but also the coming challenges under its control,” the memorandum stressed, according to state media.