MOSCOW, January 1. /TASS/. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said his country would unveil a new strategic weapon soon, the country’s KCNA news agency quoted him as saying during a plenary meeting of the 7th Central Committee of the ruling Workers’ Party.
"Saying that we should more actively push forward the project for developing strategic weapons, he [Kim] confirmed that the world will witness a new strategic weapon to be possessed by the DPRK in the near future," the agency reported.
According to Kim, North Korea would not stop its strategic nuclear weapons projects as long as the US takes a hostile stance toward Pyongyang.
"We can not give up the security of our future just for the visible economic results and happiness and comfort in reality now that hostile acts and nuclear threat against us are increasing and nothing has changed between the days when we maintained the line of simultaneously pushing forward the economic construction and the building of nuclear force and now when we struggle to direct our efforts to the economic construction owing to the U.S. gangster-like acts," the agency quoted the North Korean leader as saying.
Kim added that it would not let Washington to abuse its dialogue with Pyongyang for political gain.
"We will never allow the impudent U.S. to abuse the DPRK-U.S. dialogue for meeting its sordid aim but will shift to a shocking actual action to make it pay for the pains sustained by our people so far and for the development so far restrained," he said.
According to Kim, the scope and depth of bolstering the country’s deterrent will be properly coordinated depending on the US future attitude to the DPRK.
Nuclear test moratorium
North Korea is no longer obliged to implement its moratorium on nuclear tests due to continuous US missile tests on the Korean Peninsula, the country’s KCNA news agency quoted the country’s leader Kim Jong-un as saying during a plenary meeting of the 7th Central Committee of the ruling Workers’ Party.
"In the past two years alone when the DPRK took preemptive and crucial measures of halting its nuclear test and ICBM test-fire and shutting down the nuclear-test ground for building confidence between the DPRK and the U.S., the U.S., far from responding to the former with appropriate measures, conducted tens of big and small joint military drills which its president personally promised to stop and threatened the former militarily through the shipment of ultra-modern warfare equipment into south Korea," Kim was quoted as saying.
"Under such condition, there is no ground for us to get unilaterally bound to the commitment any longer, the commitment to which there is no opposite party, and this is chilling our efforts for worldwide nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation," he said.
"Under such condition, there is no ground for us to get unilaterally bound to the commitment any longer, the commitment to which there is no opposite party, and this is chilling our efforts for worldwide nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation," the North Korean leader continued.
"There is no need to hesitate with any expectation of the U.S. lift of sanctions even now that we had close look into the real intention of the U.S.," he said, adding if the U.S. persists in its hostile policy towards the DPRK, there will never be the denuclearization on the Korean peninsula.
"We will reliably put on constant alert the powerful nuclear deterrent capable of containing the nuclear threats from the U.S. and guaranteeing our long-term security, noting that the scope and depth of bolstering our deterrent will be properly coordinated depending on the U.S. future attitude to the DPRK." Kim added.
The end of December is the deadline Pyongyang set for Washington for drafting a mutually acceptable compromise at the denuclearization talks. On December 3, North Korea’s Deputy Foreign Minister Ri Thae Song said the ball was in the US court. "It is entirely up to the US what Christmas gift it will select to get", Ri said.
During his visit to South Korea on June 30, US President Donald Trump visited the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) on the border with North Korea where he met with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in the border village of Panmunjeom. The two leaders agreed to resume working-level consultations on denuclearization, which were suspended after their futile summit in Hanoi in February 2019. Under this agreement, US and North Korean delegations met in Stockholm on October 5 to discuss ways to normalize bilateral relations. However they failed to establish dialogue. Whereas Kim Myong-Gil, who led the North Korean delegation, said the talks had been a failure, the US Department of States described these consultations as constructive.