North Korea is ready to give the United States a “severe lesson” if Washington takes military action against Pyongyang, pledging it will “under no circumstances” put its nuclear weapons and ballistic programmes on the negotiating table, the country’s foreign minister has said.
“We will under no circumstances put the nukes and ballistics rockets on [the] negotiating table,” Ri Yong-ho said in a statement released on Monday in the Philippine capital Manila, where he was attending a regional meeting of the Association of the South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN).
“Neither shall we flinch even an inch from the road to bolstering up the nuclear forces chosen by ourselves unless the hostile policy and nuclear threat of the US against the DPRK [North Korea] are fundamentally eliminated.”
Ri said that the situation on the Korean Peninsula was becoming more extreme because of arbitrary actions by the US.
“We have no intention to use nuclear weapons against or threaten with nuclear weapons any other country except the US unless it joins military action of the US against North Korea,” he said.
The warning came two days after the UN Security Council unanimously approved new sanctions to punish North Korea, including a ban on coal and other exports worth over $1bn, for its Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) test-launches last month.
Tillerson’s remarks
North Korea was under fire at the ASEAN forum in Manila, where US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Pyongyang should signal it was prepared to resume talks by stopping its missile tests.
“The best signal that North Korea could send that they’re prepared to talk would be to stop these missile launches,” said Tillerson.
