SEOUL, June 26. /TASS/. Aggressive actions by the US, including holding drills with South Korea, are pushing the Korean Peninsula toward a nuclear conflict, a research report by the Institute for American Studies of the Foreign Ministry of the DPRK said.

"Such bellicose moves of the US have pushed the military tensions on the Korean Peninsula and in Northeast Asia already plunged into an extremely unstable situation closer to the brink of a nuclear war," the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) quoted the report as saying.

After President Yoon Suk Yeol, "hell-bent on sycophancy toward the US," was elected in South Korea, "war exercises under different codenames have been spearheaded by the US nonstop across South Korea and such war rehearsals are getting more and more adventurous and reckless in their scale, scope, intensity and contents as the days go by," the report said. Additionally, the US is conducting various intelligence operations in the region "on an unprecedented scale."

"This year the US is resorting to the worrying hostile acts of wantonly encroaching upon the sovereignty and security of the DPRK more persistently than ever before and their gravity and danger have reached the threshold of explosion which can no longer be tolerated," the report said.

Its authors point out that the interests of major powers intersect on the Korean Peninsula, so an armed conflict there would rapidly morph into a "world war and a thermonuclear war unprecedented in the world" with the "most catastrophic and irreversible consequences to peace and security on the Korean Peninsula and in Northeast Asia and the rest of the world."

The report emphasizes that while the US persists with its "anachronistic hostile policy" and military threats toward North Korea, Pyongyang will continue to beef up its defense potential in order to protect its sovereignty, dignity and security. It stresses that the DPRK, as a sovereign state, will continue to exercise its right to self-defense.