Days after the momentous first address by US President Donald Trump to the United Nations General Assembly, where he castigated North Korea for its defiant series of nuclear arms testing and threatened to destroy it if it did not stop, the secluded regime finally fired back. In typical rhetoric that sets itself up against the rest of the world, the leadership of the autocratic nation threatened its most audacious test yet: the detonation of a Hydrogen bomb in the Pacific in response to Trump’s boast. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un even managed to cause a social media stir after he described the President using an uncommonly-used word.

Bomb in the ocean

The news was dropped by North Korean foreign minister Ri Yong Ho on Thursday, September 21. He warned that his country’s military is considering a test of a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific Ocean as a retaliatory response to President Donald Trump’s inflammatory UN speech. Minister Ri was part of the North Korean delegation during the General Assembly and was scheduled to make his own address this coming Friday, September 22. But he and the rest of the delegation were conspicuously absent during President Trump’s address, and Ri has decided to skip his own speech.

"This could probably mean the strongest hydrogen bomb test over the Pacific Ocean,” remarked Ri on the plans of the North Korean government.

While this action will ultimately rest on a final decision by Kim Jong-un, the foreign minister could not presume to know his leader’s thoughts. “Regarding which measures to take, I don't really know since it is what Kim Jong-un does." This statement comes on the heels of a response to Trump from Kim himself, which vowed to make the President “pay dearly” for his threats of destroying North Korea if it escalated its nuclear tests near Japan to full aggression.

Trump the ‘dotard’

It was Kim Jong-un’s own statement that sparked a new social media storm regarding President Donald Trump that might soon equal his past Tweet misspelling “covfefe” (“coverage”). In addition to decrying Trump as unfit for his office, Kim had vowed to “tame the mentally deranged US dotard with fire." Twitter posters soon began pestering Merriam-Webster for a definition of the word “dotard,” as it is not frequently used these days, Now it has been pushed to prominence by the eloquent translation of the North Korean leader’s statement.

The provided definition by the online dictionary service was “One in his dotage” (being doted on), which in its earliest form in the 14th Century meant “an imbecile.” Nowadays it would refer to a senile old person. Only time will tell how President Trump will respond to this riposte of his UN speech, and how it might affect the North Korea situation.