North Korea said on Sunday that its status as a nuclear weapons state is “irreversible” and essential to regional stability, rejecting renewed calls by the United States and its allies for denuclearisation.
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The statement, carried by state media, came after a trilateral meeting between South Korea, Japan and the United States in Tokyo on Friday, where the allies reaffirmed their commitment to the “complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula”, according to Seoul’s foreign ministry.
An unnamed spokesperson for North Korea’s foreign ministry said US-led security cooperation in the region and weapons transfers to South Korea and Japan justified Pyongyang’s continued pursuit of nuclear weapons.
“The US and its vassal forces’ meaningless rhetoric against North Korea can never affect the irreversible position of North Korea as a nuclear weapons state,” the spokesperson said in a statement published by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
The spokesperson added that the issue of denuclearisation was “irreversibly finalised”, calling Pyongyang’s nuclear capability a “strong security guarantee for regional stability and peace”.
North Korea has repeatedly insisted it will not abandon its nuclear arsenal, portraying it as essential for deterrence. Earlier this month, Kim Yo Jong, the influential sister of leader Kim Jong Un, described the policy as a “line of no retreat”.
The foreign ministry statement also accused Washington of escalating tensions through military exercises and arms sales, citing what it described as preparations for nuclear confrontation targeting North Korea.
“No matter how hard the US, Japan and South Korea may quibble, they will never change the present position of North Korea as a nuclear weapons state,” the spokesperson said, referring to South Korea by the acronym of its official name.
North Korea has accelerated its nuclear weapons programme since talks with Washington collapsed in 2019, when a summit between Kim Jong Un and then US President Donald Trump in Hanoi ended without an agreement.
In a possible reference to those failed negotiations, the spokesperson said “no one can recover the ‘denuclearisation’ permanently missed in the trend of the times”.
The statement follows Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Pyongyang, during which official readouts from both sides made no reference to denuclearisation.
