NEW YORK (Dispatches) – The Permanent Mission of North Korea to the United Nations has criticized the U.S. for having nuclear weapons and urged it to stop “sharing nuclear” or “beefing up extended deterrence,” state media KCNA reported on Saturday.
While criticizing the U.S. over the AUKUS alliance and the Nuclear Consultative Group with South Korea, Pyongyang defended its nuclear weapons as an “exercise of sovereignty,” Reuters reported.
North Korea’s “nuclear force will never be a threat to those countries respecting its sovereignty and security interests,” the mission added.
It reminded that the North had quit the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 2003, and was, accordingly, not subject to the agreement’s provisions.
The NPT allows its members to quit the treaty if they decided that “extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of the treaty, have jeopardized their supreme interests.” Pyongyang, therefore, asserts that its withdrawal from the agreement was “legal.”
“Signatories to the NPT should not take issue with the DPRK over its legitimate exercise of sovereignty, as it had legally withdrawn from the NPT 20 years ago,” the North Korean mission went on. The DPRK stands for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, which is the North’s official name.
“Its nuclear force will never be a threat to those countries respecting its sovereignty and security interests,” the permanent mission said.
The mission, meanwhile, took aim at the United States -- the only country that has ever deployed nuclear arms -- for ceaselessly finding fault with Pyongyang for owning them, despite its own possession of such weapons.
The critique came amid rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula, which the North attributes to excessive militarization of the region by the U.S. and its regional allies, the South and Japan, through trilateral war games and deployment of American nuclear assets to the peninsula.