North Korea Says It Has the Right to Shoot Down U.S. Warplanes<br />Mr. Kim, in an unusually direct response, said last week<br />that Mr. Trump’s insults to him and his country in his United Nations General Assembly speech amounted to the “most ferocious declaration of a war in history,” which warranted “the highest level of hard-line countermeasure in history.”<br />If North Korea were to shoot down a United States military aircraft, it would not be the first time since the Korean War.<br />North Korea had already deemed Mr. Trump’s threat at the United Nations — to “totally destroy” North<br />Korea if the United States were forced to defend itself or its allies — a declaration of war.<br />North Korea threatened on Monday to shoot down American warplanes even if they were not in the country’s airspace, stating<br />that President Trump’s comments suggesting he would eradicate North Korea and its leaders were “a declaration of war.”<br />The warning, made by Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho of North Korea in New York after a week of United Nations General Assembly meetings, escalated the invective-laced exchanges with Mr. Trump<br />and appeared to further preclude the possibility of a diplomatic exit from the biggest foreign crisis the administration has faced.<br />Administration officials denied that the United States had declared war on the isolated, nuclear-armed country of 25<br />million people, with Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, calling such a suggestion “absurd.”<br />She also said that “it’s never appropriate to shoot down another country’s aircraft when it’s over international waters” and<br />that the United States wants a peaceful denuclearization of North Korea.
