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Strengthening the war deterrent is our final option

67 years have passed since the gunfire of the war ceased on this land. But, there is one thing that has not ceased at all. It is none other than the US policy hostile towards the DPRK.

The United States is becoming ever-more undisguised day by day in its scheme to stifle the DPRK by force and gain military edge in the Asia-Pacific region and, furthermore, to realize its ambition for world hegemony at any cost.

The DPRK government put forward a number of peace proposals and initiatives, including the proposal for concluding a DPRK-US peace agreement (1970s) and the proposal for establishing a new peace mechanism (1990s), all of which were rejected outright by the US.

In the second half of the 1990s, the four-party talks were held involving the DPRK, the US, China and south Korea for an establishment of durable peace mechanism on the Korean Peninsula, but no fruit was produced due to the insincere attitude of the US.

In the new century, we put forward the proposal for bringing earlier a declaration on putting an end to the war and the proposal for convening at the earliest possible date a meeting for replacing the Armistice Agreement with a peace agreement by 2010, the 60th year of the outbreak of the Korean war. But the United States turned down all of those proposals.

Instead, the US openly designated our country as an "axis of evil", "outpost of tyranny" and "target of pre-emptive nuclear strike" and illegally labelled us as a "sponsor of terrorism", "proliferation of weapons of mass destruction", "human rights abuse", "money laundering", "counterfeiting", "drug trafficking" in order to justify its policy hostile towards the DPRK.

It did not even hesitate to make such reckless remarks as "total destruction" of the DPRK and run amuck to overturn our ideology and system.

The US policy hostile towards the DPRK is well evidenced by the fact that it posed nuclear threats to us, openly talking about using nuclear weapons.

The US had openly stated that it would drop atomic bombs on the DPRK during the Korean war, and escalated its nuclear threats against us even after the conclusion of the Armistice Agreement.

When its armed spy ship Pueblo was captured in January 1968, the US reviewed the option for nuclear attack against us, and when the large-size reconnaissance plane "EC-121" was shot down in our territorial airspace in April 1969, it kept the nukes-mounted tactical bombers on emergency standby while the then US President Nixon made such reckless remarks that he decided to approve the use of atomic bombs in case north Korea strikes back. Such nuclear threats and blackmail by the US against the DPRK are just the tip of the iceberg.

The war in Kosovo triggered off by the US from March to June 1999 was a war of injustice, simulating a second Korean war.

The former Yugoslavia served the US for a test ground of a new Korean war, because the country has the natural and geographical conditions similar to the Korean Peninsula and its distance from the US mainland is almost the same as that from the US mainland to the Korean Peninsula.

The facts that the US, together with NATO, conducted ceaseless and indiscriminate air raids of zero operational significance and ruthlessly used depleted uranium bombs and WMDs that spread toxic bacteria, gave a glimpse into an oblique scene of the second Korean war being plotted by the US.

At the turn of a new millennium, the nuclear threats by the US against the DPRK became evermore blatant.

On June 6, 2001, Bush announced the so-called "North Korea Policy Statement" where he claimed that the US would wield its military strength, including nuclear weapons, if the DPRK does not accept its demand of nuclear inspection, suspension of development and launch of missiles, and reduction of conventional weapons.

In 2002, the US stated that it could be the first to use nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula and it would develop small-size nuclear bunker busters to this end, thereby making its preemptive nuclear attack on the DPRK a fait accompli.

In 2009, at the 41st session of the US-south Korea Annual Security Consultative Meeting, it announced in writing that it would provide extended deterrent such as nuclear umbrella, conventional strike capabilities and missile defense system to south Korea.

The American nuclear threats against the DPRK reached its peak in 2017.

The US drove the situation of the Korean Peninsula to the brink of a nuclear war by deploying nuclear strategic assets and latest military hardware, including the super-large nuclear-powered aircraft carriers Carl Vinson and Ronald Reagan, nuclear strategic bombers "B-1B", "B-52H" and "B-2A", nuclear-powered submarines Columbus, Tucson and Michigan, in and around south Korea.

The US hostile policy and nuclear threats against the DPRK became further aggressive after the DPRK-US Summit held in Singapore for establishing a new bilateral relationship and building a lasting and durable peace mechanism on the Korean Peninsula.

Despite the fact that we voluntarily took such crucial and meaningful initiatives as the discontinuation of nuclear test and ICBM test-fire for the sake of confidence-building, the US, far from responding to us with corresponding measures, conducted tens of joint military drills, which its President personally promised to stop, and threatened the DPRK militarily by shipping ultra-modern military hardware into south Korea.

It conducted a test-fire simulating the interception of our intercontinental ballistic missile, followed by open test-launches of all kinds of missiles, including ICBM "Minuteman-3" and SLBM "Trident 2D-5", thus maximizing the nuclear threats against us.

Even amid the unprecedented crisis caused by COVID-19, it never gave up its military threats against us, staging a joint air drill and a marine corps joint landing drill in April this year.

No other nation on this planet than the Korean nation has so directly suffered from nuclear threats for so long. To our people, nuclear threat is not at all an abstract concept but actual and concrete experience.

Our nation suffered directly from the US nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and our nation is the second largest victim after the Japanese people.

To our people who personally experienced the horrible nuclear holocaust, the US nuclear blackmail during the Korean war was literally a nightmare, and a procession of "A-bomb refugees" streaming from the north to the south appeared on the Korean Peninsula in the period of the Korean war.

Many families who could not move together sent only their husbands or sons to the south in hopes of carrying on their family lines.

This is how the separated families of millions of people came into being, and they still live separately in the north and south of the Korean Peninsula and abroad.

In order to eliminate the nuclear threats from the US, the DPRK government has made all possible efforts either through dialogue or in resort to the international law, but all ended in a vain effot.

The only option left was to counter nuke with nuke.

In the long run, the US compelled us to possess nuke.

This brought to an end the nuclear imbalance in the Northeast Asia, where only the DPRK has been left without nukes while all other countries have been equipped with nuclear weapons or nuclear umbrella.

All these facts clearly prove that the root cause of the tension on the Korean Peninsula lies in the US hostile policy and nuclear threats towards the DPRK and that the dark clouds of a nuclear war can never be cleared away from the Korean Peninsula unless the US withdraws its hostile policy that treats the DPRK as an enemy and a belligerent state.

The US might have its own calculations in keeping the dogged persistence of its concept hostile towards the DPRK and continuing the belligerent relations with the DPRK.

While the Far Eastern strategy of the US shifted to "Nixon doctrine", "Neo-Pacific doctrine", Pivot to Asia-Pacific strategy and Indo-Pacific strategy, the environment surrounding the ceasefire on the Korean Peninsula has been abused to militarily deter the potential adversaries of the US.

In recent years alone, the US deployed the high-altitude missile defence system "THAAD" in south Korea under the pretext of "missile threat" from us, thus making it possible to watch over the northeastern areas of China and the far eastern region of Russia like seeing the palm of its hand. It is also openly revealing its evil intention to deploy intermediate-range missiles in our surrounding areas on the ground that the INF Treaty has become null and void.

As a result, it has now become a matter of time when a nuclear arms race starts around the Korean Peninsula, and the US military moves to contain China and Russia are bound to grow more pronounced as the time goes by.

Under such circumstance, there is no guarantee that a second June 25 would not be repeated in case the US interests coincide with the ones of 70 years ago, a far departure from being interested in keeping the armistice on the Korean Peninsula.

It has become an indispensable strategic option for our people, who were subjected to disastrous disturbances of war on this land by the US, to possess the powerful war deterrent for national defence.

It is an indisputable, open and above-board exercise of the legitimate right to self-defence that we build up the war deterrent for defending the national security and guaranteeing our development.

The 70-year-long history of the DPRK-US confrontation graphically show that any self-restraint or broad-mindedness would never serve to contain the US high-handedness and arbitrariness, aggression and war manoeuvres, only to encourage them instead.

It is no less than the despicable double-dealing tactics for the US to talk about a sort of dialogue while maximizing its attempts to pressurize the DPRK politically, economically and militarily, and its repeated harping, like an automatic responding machine, on denuclearization betrays only its brigandish intention to disarm us and open the way to a war of aggression.

At the Fourth Enlarged Meeting of the 7th Central Military Commission of the Workers' Party of Korea, Comrade Kim Jong Un, Chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the DPRK, set forth new policies to further bolster the national nuclear war deterrent and operate the strategic force on full alert in accordance with the overall requirements for building and developing the armed forces of the country.

Under the condition where the US, the biggest nuclear power and the only user of nuclear weapons, clings to the pathological and inveterate policy hostile towards us and indulges itself in extreme nuclear threats and blackmail, we will continue building up our strength to contain the persistent nuclear threats of the US and never shrink from this road we have chosen.

Nobody on the earth could block the victorious advance of our people and our army who have inherited the heroic spirit and mettle of the great generation of victors who defeated the US-led imperialist forcess in the Fatherland Liberation War--a de facto confrontation between a rifle and an atomic bomb.