SEOUL, South Korea -- North Korea announced Tuesday that Feb. 8, the day before the Winter Olympics open in South Korea, will be a national holiday honoring its army, raising the possibility that it will hold a large military parade in a show of force on the eve of the games.
In recent weeks, South Korean officials have observed signs that the North, which is sending athletes to the Olympics, might be preparing for such a parade in its capital, Pyongyang, including large gatherings of troops and vehicles.
The North's official Korean Central News Agency said Tuesday that Feb. 8 would be commemorated as the country's new Army Building Day. That holiday had previously been observed on April 25, the date when the North's founding leader, Kim Il Sung, was said to have founded a guerrilla unit in 1932 to resist Japanese colonial rule.
Though the North has long said that its regular army was founded on Feb. 8, 1948, until now it had treated that date as less significant than April 25. This Feb. 8 will mark 70 years since the army's founding, a milestone anniversary of the kind that North Korea often observes with enormous military parades, featuring columns of goose-stepping soldiers, tanks and missiles.
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Before the announcement Tuesday, Paektu Cultural Exchange, an organization that arranges North Korea tours, had been advertising a trip to Pyongyang that it said could include watching a "rare military parade" on Feb. 8.
The South Korean Defense Ministry said on Tuesday that it was closely monitoring signs that the North might be planning a parade.
Also on Tuesday, CIA Director Mike Pompeo said North Korea is moving "ever closer" to putting Americans at risk and that he believes leader Kim Jong Un won't rest until he's able to threaten multiple nuclear attacks against the U.S. at the same time.
"North Korea is ever closer to being able to hold America at risk." Pompeo said at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington. "I want everyone to understand that we are working diligently to make sure that a year from now I can still tell you that they are several months away from having that capacity."
Pompeo also said the CIA believes Kim would not only use nuclear weapons to stay in power, but to threaten to reunify the divided Korean Peninsula under his totalitarian regime. The quest for reunification is disputed by some North Korean experts who see Kim's nuclear program as primarily a means of retaining power and don't think he would threaten or forcibly try to take over South Korea.
Pompeo said North Korea's nuclear weapons program has developed at a "very rapid clip," but that Kim is hoping for an arsenal of nuclear weapons -- "not one, not a showpiece, not something to drive on a parade route."
He wants the ability to deliver nuclear weapons from multiple missiles fired simultaneously. "That increases the risk to America," Pompeo said.
Despite his warning, Pompeo doesn't think a North Korean attack on the United States is imminent. He said President Donald Trump's administration is "laser-focused" on achieving a diplomatic solution to the nuclear standoff.
Americans should know that it is working to prepare a series of options so the president has the "full range of possibilities" to address the threat. He wouldn't address the question of whether there are military options available to the U.S. that don't risk an escalation into nuclear war with North Korea.
On Tuesday, a team of South Korean officials went to the North for logistical preparations at tourist and ski resorts where the two sides have agreed to hold pre-Olympic cultural events and train non-Olympic skiers together. A team of North Korean officials finished a similar trip to the South on Monday, to review potential venues for performances by North Korean artists.
President Moon Jae-in and other South Koreans have welcomed the North's participation in the games as an opportunity to ease the tensions that have built up over the past year over Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program. But that sentiment is far from unanimous in the South, where others see it as a bid by Kim to weaken international unity on sanctions against the North.
Information for this article was contributed by Choe Sang-hun of The New York Times; and by Deb Riechmann and Matt Pennington of The Associated Press.
A Section on 01/24/2018