Kim Jong Un spends Sunday afternoon watching men break bricks with their heads

North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un spent his day watching officials parade powerful weapons before his men hit one another with mallets.

Kim smiled as his country’s soldiers launched themselves on top of concrete slabs and broke bricks with their heads.

The strange stunt was to allow Kim to become ‘acquainted with the training of special operations’, apparently, according to state media.

As KCNA put it: ‘The training base was overflowing with the high spirit of combatants of special operations sub-units, full of ardent mind to give pleasure and satisfaction to the respected Comrade Kim Jong Un who is ceaselessly visiting the frontline posts for bolstering up the military capabilities to defend the security of the state and the people, through demonstration of the strongest fighting efficiency.’

Such ‘efficiency’ also saw the troops perform a martial arts routine before one somersaulted.

Footage captured the men smashing their comrades’ elbows and feet with mallets.

Another soldier, carrying a stick, whacked it so hard against another soldier that it split in half.

Kim, meanwhile, sat smiling in a desk chair at a large, ornate wooden table.

The test ended with the soldiers gathering around Kim, cheering and jumping in the air as they took a photograph with him.

The KCNA report explained that the troops were so ecstatic because they admire their ‘ever-victorious, iron-willed, brilliant commander’.

North Korean officials praised the soldiers for their ‘fighting spirit and heroic stamina of our invincible army to unconditionally annihilate the enemy’.

The soldiers showing their strength off were from special operations sub-units, the news agency added.

Kim earlier oversaw the testing of the authoritarian nation’s solid-fuel engine for weapons capable of reaching the US mainland.

The engine, which state media said has maximum thrust of 2,500 kilonewtons (25,500kg), is part of North Korea’s effort to upgrade itsnuclear-capable missiles, or ‘strategic strike means’.

Kim also oversaw a missile interceptor system that is capable of striking tanks ‘100%’ of the time, as another KCNA report claimed.

Lee Choon Geun, an honorary research fellow at South Korea’s Science and Technology Policy Institute, says that North Korea is ‘bluffing’ when it comes to its war weapons.

The country is struggling to build an intercontinental ballistic missile that can survive the roughhousing the atmosphere gives it on re-entry, Lee said.

North Korea has rapidly expanded its nuclear arsenal since talks with US President Donald Trump fell through in 2019.

The country has an estimated 50 warheads, according to the monitoring group, the Arms Control Association.

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