North Korea’s Kim aims to boost nuclear deterrence amid US threat

By Riyaz ul Khaliq

ISTANBUL (AA) – North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has tasked the nation’s authorities to “rapidly bolster up both in quality and quantity the nuclear force.”

In an address to the country’s Supreme People’s Assembly, Kim stressed the need “to push ahead with the work for exponentially boosting the production of nuclear weapons and diversifying the nuclear strike means and deploying them in different services.”

According to Pyongyang-based news agency KCNA, Kim said mankind “desired the world without nuclear weapons” but North Korea was “a direct victim of nuclear blackmail since the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950.”

North Korea “inevitably” had access to nuclear weapons for self-defense, Kim told the lawmakers on Thursday.

“The US imperialists have persistently escalated their nuclear threat to our Republic, once a non-nuclear state, for decades in disregard of all our peace-loving proposals, for the mere reason that its idea and system are different,” Kim told the ninth session of the 14th assembly.

He added the US has “steeped in the Cold War mentality” and has “gone to extremes” in its anti-North Korea military provocations.”

Thus, he said, “it is very important” for Pyongyang “to accelerate the modernization of nuclear weapons in order to hold the definite edge of strategic deterrence.”

“As long as our Republic exists as a socialist state and as long as the tyrannical nuclear weapons of the imperialists trying to stamp out independence and socialism exist on the earth, we must neither change nor concede the present position of our country as a nuclear weapons state, but, on the contrary, continue to further strengthen the nuclear force,” Kim said, calling it “serious strategic judgment made by our (Workers) Party and government.”

He accused Washington of “maximizing” its nuclear war threats to North Korea by “resuming the large-scale nuclear war joint drills with clear aggressive nature and putting the deployment of its strategic nuclear assets near the Korean peninsula on a permanent basis.”