SEOUL, September 15. /TASS/. Attempts to achieve the denuclearization of Pyongyang are tantamount to an infringement on the country's constitutional order, the North Korean permanent mission to the United Nations said in a statement quoted by the Korean Central News Agency.
The statement was in response to a US comment at a session of the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in which the US raised the issue of North Korea’s denuclearization. "We strongly denounce and reject the US’ provocative act of revealing once again its invariable hostile intention against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea while openly interfering in its internal affairs and infringing upon its sovereignty, and express serious concern over the negative consequences to be entailed by it," the mission said.
"The US repeated its anachronistic ‘denuclearization’ assertion at the international meeting, clearly proving that the final goal of its policy towards the DPRK is to make the latter abandon its constitution and system, and [showing that] the US has no intention to coexist with it," the diplomats emphasized. According to them, North Korea insists that its choice to possess nuclear weapons, which guarantee the state's sovereignty, was inevitable due to the continuing US nuclear threat.
"The position of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea as a nuclear weapons state, which has been permanently specified in the supreme and basic law of the state, has become irreversible. The IAEA, which has not formally established relations with the DPRK for more than 30 years, has no legal right or moral justification to interfere in the internal affairs of a nuclear weapons state which exists outside the NPT [Treaty]," the permanent mission said. At the same time, the diplomats pointed out that North Korea will "faithfully discharge its duty before the international community as a responsible nuclear weapons state.".