North Korea says U.S.-South Korea exercises leading to ‘nuclear disaster’

UNITED NATIONS – North Korea warned Monday that U.S.-South Korean military exercises, which it called “the most undisguised nuclear war maneuvers,” are driving the Korean Peninsula and northeast Asia toward “nuclear disaster.”

North Korea’s U.N. Ambassador Ja Song Nam said in a letter to the U.N. Security Council that the US is using nuclear-propelled aircraft carries, nuclear submarines, nuclear strategic bombers and stealth fighters in the joint exercises that began on March 1.

“It may go over to an actual war,” he warned of the military drills, “and, consequently, the situation on the Korean Peninsula is again inching to the brink of a nuclear war.”

Ja again urged the Security Council to discuss the U.S.-South Korea exercises and warned if it ignores North Korea’s request as it has in the past it will demonstrate that the U.N.’s most powerful body is only a “political tool” of the United States.

The ambassador said the United States seeks to convince public opinion that the joint exercise is a response to North Korea’s nuclear weapons, but he said the U.S. and South Korea carried out military drills numerous times before Pyongyang possessed its “nuclear deterrent.”

Ja said the main reason the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea – the country’s official name – is equipping itself “with nuclear attack capabilities” and strengthening its nuclear deterrent forces is in self-defense against what he called the U.S. “extreme anti-DPRK hostile police and nuclear threats and blackmails as well as maneuvers to enforce its nuclear weapons.”

North Korea sent the letter on the maneuvers hours after North Korea fired four banned ballistic missiles earlier Monday, in apparent reaction to the U.S.-South Korean exercises. Three of them landed in waters that Japan claims as its exclusive economic zone, South Korean and Japanese officials said.

North Korea’s U.N. Mission also issued a press statement Monday denouncing and rejecting a report by the Security Council’s panel of experts that monitors U.N. sanctions against the DPRK. The experts said North Korea is flouting sanctions by trading in prohibited weapons and other goods and using evasion techniques “that are increasing in scale, scope and sophistication.”

The DPRK Mission again insisted that the sanctions “have no legal basis at all” and violate the country’s “lawful rights.” Furthermore, it said, no international law states that a nuclear test or satellite launch should be considered a “threat to international peace and security.”

North Korea reiterated its request to U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to organize an international forum of lawyers to clarify the legal basis of the sanctions resolutions. It said the U.N. Secretariat should not again respond with the “preposterous out-of-date sophistries” that it is up to the Security Council to determine what constitutes a threat to international peace and security.

The DPRK warned that sanctions resolutions and reports on enforcing implementation will only result in “our stronger self-defensive counter-measures” – and it said the United States, “the major fabricator of these resolutions,” will bear all responsibility “for any uncontrolled critical situation over the Korean Peninsula.”