N. Korea slams US over Pentagon document calling regime 'persistent' threat

2024-05-19 21:35:53      点击：638

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attends the ninth session of the 14th Supreme People's Assembly (SPA), which runs from Sept. 26 to 27 in Pyongyang, in this photo carried by North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency, Sept. 28. Yonhap

North Korea on Wednesday rejected a Pentagon document labeling Pyongyang a "persistent" threat, saying the world's biggest threat of weapons of mass destruction comes from none other than the United States.

In a recently updated version of the Strategy for Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction (CWMD), the U.S. Department of Defense described China as a pacing challenge, Russia as an acute threat, and the North and Iran as persistent threats. It also warned that the North's military capability advancements would give the recalcitrant regime options to use nuclear arms "at any stage of conflict."

"As for the 'persistent threat,' it is an expression most suitable for the U.S., the world's biggest WMD-armed state and the only criminal state that used A-bombs, which has labeled the DPRK as 'enemy' and escalated unprecedented nuclear threat and blackmail against it since the last century," a spokesperson for the North's defense ministry said in a statement carried by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

DPRK stands for the North's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

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The North said the "world's biggest WMD threat just comes from the U.S." and criticized the country for revealing its "dangerous intention for aggression" to threaten the North and seize "global military hegemony," according to the KCNA.

Such U.S. threats have forced the North to "strongly counter with powerful deterrence the ever-more reckless medium- and long-term threat posed by the U.S. seeking to use WMDs against the DPRK," the KCNA said.

In a key parliamentary meeting attended by leader Kim Jong-un last week, the North stipulated the policy of strengthening its nuclear force in the constitution, a year after it enacted a new nuclear law authorizing the preemptive use of nuclear arms and called its status of a nuclear state "irreversible."

Denouncing the strengthening security cooperation among South Korea, the U.S. and Japan, Kim said the trilateral cooperation poses the "worst actual threat" and stressed the need to "exponentially" bolster the country's nuclear arsenal and diversify its nuclear strike capability. (Yonhap)