North Korea Ridicules Trump, Threatens Hydrogen Bomb Test In Pacific 

North Korea’s foreign minister, Ri Yong-ho, has issued a withering riposte to Donald Trump, likening his threat to destroy the regime to the “sound of a dog barking”, adding that he “felt sorry” for the US president’s advisers.

In his first speech to the UN general assembly, Trump said on Tuesday the US would be forced to “totally destroy” North Korea if Washington was forced to defend itself or its allies against the country’s missiles.

Referring to the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, by a nickname he gave him in a tweet last weekend, Trump said to the visible dismay of some in the hall: “Rocket man is on a suicide mission for himself and his regime.”

Speaking to reporters outside his hotel after arriving in New York on Wednesday, Ri cited a Korean proverb when asked to respond to Trump’s vow to destroy his country.

“There is a saying that the marching goes on even when dogs bark,” Ri said, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency.

“If he was thinking he could scare us with the sound of a dog barking, that’s really a dog dream,” he added. In Korean, a dog dream is one that makes little sense.

Asked what he thought of Trump’s description of Kim as rocket man, Ri replied: “I feel sorry for his aides.”

Trump’s confrontational speech came after months of rising tensions on the Korean peninsula, culminating in Pyongyang’s sixth, and biggest, nuclear test and the launch of two ballistic missiles over northern Japan.

Meanwhile, Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, told the UN General Assembly that previous talks had come to nothing and called for a global blockade that would deny North Korea access to “goods, funds, people and technology” for its missile and nuclear programmes.

Japan Braces As North Korea Threatens Hydrogen Bomb Test In Pacific

Speculation is growing that North Korea will add to its robust verbal response to Trump’s UN speech on Tuesday with a military provocation, possibly a test of a Hwasong-14 missile, which is theoretically capable of reaching Hawaii and Alaska.

Chung Sung-yoon, an analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification, said there was a “very high possibility” that Kim would follow through with a provocation of some sort.

While the North has claimed it is able to mount a miniaturized nuclear weapon on a missile, the regime has yet to offer definitive proof.

The US and Japan have warned they will shoot down any missile they consider a threat to Japanese territory.

Monitoring groups estimate that the nuclear test conducted in North Korea this month - its sixth and largest - had a yield of 250 kilotons, which is 16 times the size of the US bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.

In a statement carried by the official KCNA news agency, Kim called Trump “mentally deranged” and warned him that he would “pay dearly” for issuing threats to the regime during his maiden UN general assembly speech on Tuesday.

Describing the president as “a rogue and a gangster fond of playing with fire”, Kim drew a critical comparison between Trump and his predecessors in the White House, calling him unfit to hold the position of commander in chief.

“Far from making remarks of any persuasive power that can be viewed to be helpful to defuse tension, he made unprecedented rude nonsense one has never heard from any of his predecessors.”

In a combative speech, Trump warned he would “totally destroy” North Korea if it attacked the US or its allies, and called on other countries to cut the regime off from its sources of funds.

“The mentally deranged behavior of the US president openly expressing on the UN arena the unethical will to ‘totally destroy’ a sovereign state … makes even those with normal thinking faculty think about discretion and composure,” Kim said.