Pyongyang, August 5 (KCNA) -- The DPRK permanent mission to the UN Office and international organizations in Vienna issued the following press release on August 4:

At the first session of the preparatory committee for the 11th NPT review conference, the U.S. and its vassal forces unreasonably criticized the DPRK's nuclear deterrent for self-defense as a "threat" to the international peace and security and the nuclear non-proliferation system. In this regard, the DPRK permanent mission to the UN Office and international organizations in Vienna makes public the following press release:

As for threat to the international peace and security and the nuclear non-proliferation system, it has come evidently from the U.S. at present.

The U.S. openly declared it as a state policy to highly modernize the nuclear weapon industry and rapidly upgrade the three nuclear strategic assets and has spent astronomical military expenditure on it every year. And it has deliberately refused to implement New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) that may be regarded as the last fortress of the Nuclear Disarmament Treaty.

Unilaterally prioritizing the narrow security interests of it and its allies, the U.S. is also pushing ahead with nuclear proliferation to Australia under the signboard of the AUKUS alliance. Some days ago, it started the operation of the U.S.-south Korea "Nuclear Consultative Group" simulating the use of nukes against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) and deployed a nuclear submarine loaded with strategic nuclear weapons in the Korean peninsula for the first time in 42 years, thus escalating the military tension in the region to the eve of the outbreak of a nuclear war.

The DPRK's bolstering of nuclear deterrent for self-defense is a just exercise of its sovereignty to prevent the outbreak of a nuclear war, defend the national sovereignty and territorial integrity and control and manage the situation of the Korean peninsula in a stable way, under the unstable security environment in the region caused by such nuclear threat from the U.S. and its allied forces.

This being a hard reality, the U.S. let even its satellite countries go so far as to seriously distort the reality, doggedly pulling up the DPRK over its measures for bolstered self-defensive military capabilities. This is a political provocation to cover up its true colors as a criminal state which used nukes and to evade the international community's criticism over its non-compliance with nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation treaties.

The DPRK is a responsible nuclear weapons state which committed itself to the ban on nuclear use and threat to non-nuclear states and to the nuclear non-proliferation. Its nuclear force will never be a threat to those countries respecting its sovereignty and security interests.

Its stand on the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) is clear.

Signatories to the NPT should not take issue with the DPRK over its legitimate exercise of sovereignty, as it had legally withdrawn from the NPT 20 years ago according to the right of a signatory specified in the treaty, but concentrate efforts on finding solutions to the major challenges facing the treaty.

And the U.S., the world's biggest nuclear weapons state and the world's first nuclear user, should halt at once the criminal acts of systematically violating and wrecking the international disarmament system while threatening and blackmailing sovereign states by deploying its nuclear strategic assets in different parts of the world.

It should immediately stop the moves for "sharing nuclear" and "beefing up extended deterrence" with non-nuclear states that undermine the basis of the international nuclear non-proliferation system and trigger off nuclear arms race in the world and the region.

The international community should raise the voices of denunciation against the U.S. dangerous threat of nuclear use and illegal acts like the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the root cause of instability and confrontation, and immediately take practical measures for ensuring global peace and security. -0-

www.kcna.kp (Juche112.8.5.)