Should the United States take it seriously the new statement from North Korea or treat it as just another rhetoric? The North Korea’s deputy UN ambassador warned Monday that the situation on the Korean peninsula “has reached the touch-and-go point and a nuclear war may break out any moment.”
Kim In Ryong told the UN General Assembly’s disarmament committee that North Korea is the only country in the world that has been subjected to “such an extreme and direct nuclear threat” from the United States since the 1970s — and said the country has the right to possess nuclear weapons in self-defense.
He pointed to large-scale military exercises every year using “nuclear assets” and said what is more dangerous is what he called a US plan to stage a “secret operation aimed at the removal of our supreme leadership.”
Kim said, North Korea this year completed its “state nuclear force and thus became the full-fledged nuclear power which possesses the delivery means of various ranges, including the atomic bomb, H-bomb and intercontinental ballistic rockets.” “The entire US mainland is within our firing range and if the US dares to invade our sacred territory even an inch it will not escape our severe punishment in any part of the globe,” he warned.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday said his country is complying with the UN sanction on North Korea by curtailing it’s economic, scientific and other ties. The EU has also announced a sanctions on Pyongyang over its nuclear and ballistic missiles programmes.
In further justification of his country’s position, the North Korea’s deputy UN ambassador called his country’s nuclear and missile arsenal “a precious strategic asset that cannot be reversed or bartered for anything.”
“Unless the hostile policy and the nuclear threat of the US is thoroughly eradicated, we will never put our nuclear weapons and ballistic rockets on the negotiating table under any circumstances,” Kim said.
He told the disarmament committee that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — North Korea’s official name — had hoped for a nuclear-free world. Instead, Kim said, all nuclear states are accelerating the modernization of their weapons and “reviving a nuclear arms race reminiscent of (the) Cold War era.” He noted that the nuclear weapon states, including the United States, boycotted negotiations for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons that was approved in July by 122 countries at the United Nations.
