North Korea on Thursday issued a strong warning against the United States' demand for the North's complete denuclearization, saying the regime will take it as "declaring a war."
Jo Chol-su, director general of the international organization department at North Korea's foreign ministry, made the remark in a statement announced after the U.S. called for a U.N. Security Council (UNSC) resolution against the North's missile launches and human rights abuses at a UNSC meeting in New York on Monday (local time).
U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield called on all UNSC member states to join the move and seek the North's denuclearization in a "complete, verifiable and irreversible" manner, a term also known as "CVID."
"The U.S. representative to the U.N. again... spouted a litany of rhetoric about the outdated CVID and the 'human rights situation,'" Jo said in a statement carried by the state Korean Central News Agency.
"Any force should keep in mind that if it tries to apply CVID to the DPRK, it will be dealt with resolutely in accordance with the DPRK's law on nuclear force policy," he said, referring to the North by its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Jo said the U.S.' condemnation of North Korea at the U.N. stage "only reveals before the world the failure of the American-style diplomacy."
"The pressure on the DPRK to dismantle its nukes precisely means a declaration of war," he said.
The U.S. envoy also accused China and Russia -- two of the veto power-wielding permanent members of the council -- of shielding the North from any UNSC action.
The UNSC held 10 rounds of meetings last year to discuss the North's ballistic missile launches but failed to produce a formal document due to opposition from China and Russia.
Source: Yonhap News Agency