From Korean Central News Agency:
On September 24 in Pyongyang, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea released the following press statement on September 24.
A “joint statement” accusing the DPRK of its self-defensive nuclear activities was cooked up and released at a recent ministerial meeting of the “Friends of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty” held in New York.
The Foreign Ministry of the DPRK strongly condemns and rejects as a grave political provocation against the DPRK such behavior of the hostile forces who took issue with the DPRK’s legitimate and just exercise of its sovereign rights under the pretext of the promotion of earlier effectuation of the CTBT.
The member states of the “Friends of the CTBT”, which sponsored the recent ministerial meeting, are the allies or satellite countries of the U.S., the chief culprit systematically destroying the international nuclear non-proliferation system. So they have neither qualification nor face to debate the DPRK’s legitimate exercise of its right to self-defence.
It has been 30 years since the conclusion of the CTBT, but it has not yet come into effect. It is entirely because of the U.S. and its vassal forces which have openly committed criminal nuclear proliferation out of their wild ambition to secure their global nuclear hegemony.
The U.S.-led nuclear proliferation, from the sharing of nuclear weapons with NATO in the 1950s and deployment of its nuclear weapons abroad to the emergence of the nuclear submarine alliance AUKUS and the transfer of nuclear submarine technology to the ROK, has been recorded as grave threats to international peace and security.
In particular, remilitarization of Japan revealing its ill-intended scheme to arm itself with nuclear weapons through the modification of the Three Non-Nuclear Principles and the retrogressive constitutional amendments, oblivious of the lesson from its defeat in the Second World War, constitutes an actual security challenge to be strictly watched and deterred by the international community.
The criminal acts of the countries failing to honour their nuclear-disarmament and nuclear non-proliferation duty are being connived at, but a sovereign state’s legitimate exercise of its right to self-defence is being faulted. As such abnormal situation lingers, the international nuclear disarmament system and the nuclear non-proliferation system are being shaken to their roots.
Such stereotyped racket of some dishonest forces has no impact on the DPRK’s position as a nuclear weapons state.
The DPRK will never tolerate any attempts to deny its national sovereignty and constitutional position but make positive contributions to the international efforts for ensuring peace of the Korean peninsula and the rest of the world as a responsible nuclear weapons state.
