"Shooting our satellite for peaceful purposes will precisely mean a war," the general staff of the North's military said in a statement carried Monday by the official Korean Central News Agency.
Any interception will draw "a just retaliatory strike operation not only against all the interceptor means involved but against the strongholds" of the U.S., Japan and South Korea, it said.
The North has ordered military personnel "fully combat ready," KCNA said in a separate dispatch.
North Korea can certainly start a war. But North Korea cannot win such a war. And it is questionable whether they would survive such a war.
But with their sabre rattling falling on deaf ears as they rot away, Pyongyang might start that war anyway.
