As our party was unable this year to hold our annual anti-imperialist barbecue, we held instead an online meeting celebrating the Korean victory in the Fatherland Liberation War in 1953, attended by more than 1,200 online (YouTube and Twitter views within the first 18 hours).
Those who missed the meeting can catch up with it on Proletarian TV.
On this, the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean war, we also reproduce this article, first published by the DPRK’s Institute for Disarmament and Peace, with the aim of keeping alive the memory of the Korean people’s heroic struggle, as a result of which they, with the support of the international communist movement, became the first to defeat the mighty US imperialism in war (despite the US having 16 allied countries fighting on its side) and to frustrate its nefarious aims.
*****
Withdrawal of the US’s hostile policy towards the DPRK – an indispensable prerequisite for peace and stability on the Korean peninsula
Paper of the Institute for Disarmament and Peace, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
Seventy years have elapsed since the bursts of gunfire of war were heard on this land.
The Korean war forced by the United States inflicted painful scars and tremendous human and material losses upon the Korean people. Continuing even today is the suffering of national division, whereby kinsfolk of the same blood are forced to live apart.
As the Korean nation still suffers from the heartrending wounds of war, it is stronger than any other nation in respect of its cherished desire to live on a peaceful land without war, and has long persevered in its efforts to realise that desire, but in vain.
Its underlying cause is the sinister design – that is, the USA’s hostile policy towards the DPRK.
The Institute for Disarmament and Peace, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the DPRK releases this paper with a view to laying bare before the whole world the truth behind the Korean war that was ignited by the US in the 1950s of the last century, and to revealing the aggressive and predatory nature of the US’s hostile policy towards the DPRK, which imposes immeasurable misfortune and pain on the entire Korean nation.
The Korean war was an inevitable product of the US’s hostile policy towards the DPRK
The Korean war was a criminal war of aggression that was systematically prepared and provoked by the US under thoroughgoing plans to stifle the DPRK by force of arms and to hold in its hands Asia and the rest of the world.
Even though the US continues to fabricate all sorts of tricky information designed to cover up its aggressive crimes of having provoked the Korean war, the truth of history can neither be covered up nor obliterated.
Since more than one hundred years and several decades ago, the US adopted as its state policy to invade and dominate Korea, a gateway to the Asian continent, and desperately pursued a hostile policy towards Korea for its implementation.
US ruling circles presented their ‘proposal on opening Korea’ to the US Congress in February 1845 and perpetrated a series of incidents such as the intrusions of the General Sherman in 1866, the USS Shenandoah and USS China respectively in 1868, and a large-scale armed invasion in 1871.
After signing the Taft-Katsura agreement with Japan in 1905, the US backed the occupation and colonial rule by Japan over Korea while systematically attempting to turn the country into its own eventual colony.
By the end of World War 2, the USA had perfected its plan to occupy our country.
In the letter sent in March 1951 to Joseph Martin, senator of the US Congress, MacArthur, the then commander of the US forces in the Far East, wrote:
“If we lose this war to communism in Asia, the fall of Europe is inevitable.”
His view was that “By conquering all of Korea we can cut into pieces the one and only supply line connecting Soviet Siberia and south … and control the whole area between Vladivostok and Singapore. Nothing would then be beyond the reach of our power.” (Quoted in Herschel Meyer, Modern History of the United States, Kyoto, p148)
In a word, the US regarded Korea as a “dagger” to cut off a “lump of meat”, which meant Asia.
The Korean war was badly needed by the American munitions monopolies, which had been fattened by the piles of money they had amassed during World War 2. The economic crisis, which had started in the US at the end of 1948, became more acute by 1949.
Industrial production plummeted by 15 percent compared with the previous year, prices nose-dived, and investment in machinery and equipment reduced sharply, resulting in the bankruptcy of over 4,600 companies and an increase in unemployment to six million during the first half of 1949 alone.
The revenue of US monopolies shrank from $36.6bn to $28.4bn during the period between September 1948 and March 1949.
Soon after the Korean war broke out, American publications headlined: “the business called Korea revived the economy” and “the outbreak of the Korean war exorcised the evil of recession that had been agonising the American commerce since the end of the World War 2”.
This indicates that a ‘special recipe’ – ie, a war – was needed by the US at that time in order to rid itself of an economic crisis.
This is how the US chose Korea, as part of its strategy for world hegemony, as a “unique point of tangency between the American military system and the Asian mainland”, an “ideological battleground”, a “testing ground” for a showdown aimed at realising world domination, and also as the only way to get out of the economic crisis that followed World War 2.
The true aggressive colours of the US, which took the lead in preparing for the Korean war, are also clearly revealed by working out the war scenario.
The plan of the US to occupy Far East was divided into three phases: The first phase was to begin with the Korean war (A) and in the second phase the war was to be expanded into China (B), while in the final phase, Siberia was to be occupied (C). The start of the operation was slated for 1949.
A Japanese magazine dated September 1964 disclosed the story behind the scenes by citing a former colonel of the Imperial Japanese Army, who had been involved in this conspiracy, as follows:
“The operation was divided into three phases. First, ten divisions comprising the US army and south Korean army are deployed along the 38th parallel, and two operation zones – ie, the east zone and the west zone are formed.
“The west front directly advances to Pyongyang and a landing operation at northern Pyongyang with the cooperation of the navy and air forces is conducted in parallel with it. The east front chooses Yangdok as its left flank and ensures the connection between Pyongyang and Wonsan and its right flank will march directly towards Wonsan. Here again, a landing operation at northern Wonsan is conducted by a naval unit.
“These two fronts advance together up to River Amnok and break through the Sino-Korean border. This was the first phase of the operation and a detailed plan based on data provided by the former Japanese army was worked out.
“Next, the operation enters the second phase the moment the Sino-Korean border is broken through, followed by participation of the Japanese army and the United Nations forces. This was the sequence.”
With a thoroughgoing plan and concrete preparation, the US ignited the Korean war by inciting the south Korean puppet army at 4.00am on 25 June 1950.
On the eve of the war, Brigadier General William Lynn Roberts, head of the US military advisory group in south Korea, gabbled: “We have chosen the 25th and this explains our prudence. It is Sunday. It’s the Sabbath for both the United States and south Korea, Christian states. No one will believe we have started a war on Sunday. In short, it is to make people believe that we are not the first to open a war.”
After the provocation of the Korean war, the US manoeuvred cunningly to cover up its true colours as the aggressor.
On 25 June, the US requested a United Nations security council meeting, forging UNSC ‘resolution’ 82, which designated the DPRK as ‘aggressor’. On 7 July it forged yet another UNSC resolution 84, which ‘recommended’ making allied forces available to ‘a unified command under the US’ and ‘asked’ the US to designate its commander, ‘authorising’ the use of the UN flag.
The DPRK was thus branded the ‘provoker’ of the war, and the war of the Korean people to liberate their fatherland was labelled an ‘aggression’, while ‘United Nations forces’ made their appearance as a belligerent party to the war.
Several former UN secretary-generals have officially admitted that the ‘UN command’ was not a UN-controlled organ but purely a war tool of the US.
In June 1994, then UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali admitted: “The UNSC did not establish the ‘Unified Command’ as a subsidiary organ under its control, and it came to be placed under the authority of the US.” (Letter from the UN secretary-general to the minister of foreign affairs of the DPRK, 24 June 1994)
In December 1998, then UN secretary-general Kofi Annan said: “None of my predecessors have granted any authorisation to any state to make the use of the name of the UN,” referring to the forces and command dispatched by the US to the Korean war. (Letter from the UN secretary-general to the president of the presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly of the DPRK, 21 December 1998)
On 27 July 2004 and 6 March 2006, UN spokespersons confirmed that the “‘UN Command’, despite its name, is not the army of the UN, but a US-led force.”
It is not the UN but the US which has the power to appoint the ‘UN commander’. It is not the UN but the US administration which has absolute power to decide on either a reduction or an increase in those US forces in south Korea who wear the ‘UN force’ helmets.
Despite all these facts, the UN flag is still brazenly flying in Panmunjom, bringing shame on the United Nations.
This fiercest war ended in the miraculous victory of the heroic Korean people, who were under the leadership of President Kim Il Sung. But the human and material losses suffered by our nation were tremendous.
The terrible atrocities and massacres perpetrated by the US imperialists in particular cannot be detailed in this short paper.
The US imperialists, who had wormed into Sinchon County in October 1950, committed all kinds of atrocities of massacre against 35,380 innocent residents, equivalent to 25 percent of the county’s population, in 50-plus days. They burnt the innocent residents to death, drowned them in reservoir, shot to death, burnt them on the firewood, ripped apart the limbs of living persons and cut off the abdomens of pregnant women.
These facts lay bare before the world that the US imperialists are no less than wild beasts and bloodthirsty wolves in human shape.
Even according to official statistics, the US imperialists, during the Korean war, killed more than 1.23 million people in the northern half of the republic and more than 1.24 million people in south Korea, and attempted to eliminate our nation by the use of chemical and biological weapons.
In 1951, an investigation team of the Women’s International Democratic Federation, which investigated the atrocities of the imperialists on the site, wrote in its report: “The massacres and tortures committed by the US troops in the areas of their temporary occupation are more atrocious than those committed by Hitler’s Nazis in Europe.”
Openly clamouring that they would “wipe out 78 cities and towns of north Korea from the map” and “leave nothing intact”, the US, throughout the Korean war, dropped almost 600,000 tons of bombs and napalm on the northern half of the republic – 3.7 times the amount of bombs dropped on the Japanese mainland during the Pacific war.
Severely destroyed owing to these atrocities were 50,941 factories and enterprises, 28,632 school buildings, 4,534 medical buildings, including hospitals and clinics, 579 scientific research buildings, 8,163 media and cultural buildings, 2,077,226 homes. Moreover, 563,755 hectares of farming land was damaged, and the total reduced area of paddy and non-paddy fields amounted to 155,500 hectares.
When the war was over, there was nothing left but ashes, and the US bragged that Korea would not recover even after 100 years.
All these facts eloquently show that the US imperialists were the provokers of the Korean war and the sworn enemy of the Korean people, and prove that peace will never settle on the Korean peninsula as long as the US’s hostile policy towards the DPRK persists.
Criminal and systematic abolition of the armistice agreement
The US’s hostile manoeuvres towards the DPRK after the Korean war are characterised by pursuit of the permanent division of the Korean peninsula and by ceaseless nuclear threats and blackmail against the DPRK.
The Korean war, which war chief President Harry S Truman described as no less than the World War 3, came to a pause with the conclusion of the armistice agreement. But this meant neither the end of war nor the conclusion of a peace agreement.
At the time of its conclusion, the armistice constituted no more than a transitional step aimed at withdrawing all foreign troops from the Korean peninsula and establishing lasting peace.
No sooner had the armistice agreement been signed than the US drove the situation of the Korean peninsula to the brink of war once more, in flagrant violation of the agreement, driven by the wild ambition to make our people its slaves by any means and to seize the whole of peninsula.
Around 10.20pm on 27 July 1953, less than half an hour after the armistice agreement came into force, the US army fired several machine gun shots towards our side’s area, continuing to fire shells over the border at intervals of tens of minutes for several hours.
In disregard of the paragraph 10, article I of the armistice agreement, which stipulates that only pistols and rifles can be carried in the demilitarised zone (DMZ), including in the joint security area (JSA), the US army introduced not only automatic rifles and machine guns but also cannons, tanks, flame throwers, helicopters and more, and opened gunfire towards our side’s posts and guardsmen indiscriminately almost every day.
Since 1968, the US army has mobilised fully-armed troops to repeat the military operations it had conducted in the areas along the 38th parallel, including Mount Songak, just before the provocation of the 25 June war.
The US army has committed innumerable acts of provocation in the Panmunjom JSA, including Panmunjom incident on 18 August 1976 and the incident of gunfire towards our security personnel on 23 November 1984.
The US nullified paragraph 60, article IV of the armistice agreement, which envisages the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Korea and the peaceful settlement of the Korean question.
Paragraph 60 of the armistice agreement stipulated that within three months after the armistice agreement becomes effective a political conference of a higher level is to be held to negotiate the questions of the withdrawal of all foreign forces from the Korean peninsula and the ways for peaceful settlement of the Korean question.
At the preparatory talks for a political conference that were convened at Panmunjom on 26 October 1953, the US laid artificial obstacles, only clinging to the obstructive manoeuvres, and on 12 December the same year, it unilaterally withdrew from the meeting room. Thus the talks didn’t proceed to the main conference, but was ruptured in the preparatory stage.
Afterwards, the Geneva conference was convened for the peaceful settlement of the Korean question, but the US deliberately disrupted the conference.
On 8 August 1953, the US staged the ceremony of signing of what is called a ‘mutual defence treaty’ with south Korea in order to legitimise permanent stationing of US troops in south Korea.
On 2 January 1955, the then chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff made reckless remarks that the US army would station, for an indefinite period, in south Korea which is of great strategic significance in its world hegemony, and that it would continue to hinder the peaceful coordination of the Korean question.
After the UN resolution on dissolution of the ‘UN command’ for the durable peace on the Korean peninsula was adopted at the 30th session of the UN general assembly in November 1975, the US clung more openly to its scheme for the permanent occupation by cooking up the US-south Korea ‘Combined Forces Command’.
In early March 2006, the US worked out the plan and got down to its implementation for expanding and reorganising the nominal ‘UN command’ into a permanent organisation of multinational forces by way of increasing the role of belligerent states of the Korean war and permitting them to take part not only in the formulation of emergency and operational plans but also in detailed activities.
Thus, the process for converting the armistice agreement into a peace agreement miscarried, and the unstable state of neither war nor peace continues on the Korean peninsula.
In August 1953 the US went totally against paragraph 13(b), article II of the armistice agreement and unilaterally drew the ‘northern limit line’ in the West Sea of Korea, which is an act of illegal and outrageous crime, thereby transforming its surrounding areas into the world’s most dangerous hotspot. It is also attempting in every way to impose a blockade on our country under the pretext of the ‘proliferation security initiative’, running counter to paragraph 15, article II which prohibits any kind of blockade against the DPRK.
The US nullified paragraph 13(d), article II of the armistice agreement which called for a complete cessation of introduction of all military materiel from outside of the Korean territory and turned south Korea into a world’s weapons exhibition hall.
The US incessantly threatened and blackmailed the inspection teams of the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission, which were mandated according to paragraph 13(c), article II of the armistice agreement to supervise and inspect the introductions of military materiel from outside of the Korean territory, and eventually expelled them from south Korea in June 1956, thereby paralysing their inspection functions.
In May 1957, the then US secretary of state openly stated in public that “the US should consider sending more modern and effective weapons to south Korea”, and on 21 June the same year, the US army side that attended the 75th meeting of the Military Armistice Commission (MAC) announced its unilateral abrogation of paragraph 13(d) of the armistice agreement.
The US shipped into south Korea more than 1,000 nuclear weapons during the period between the late 1950s and the 1980s. As a result, south Korea was converted into the most highly deployed area of nuclear weapons in the world, their number being over four times that of Nato member states, and into an advanced outpost for outbreak of a nuclear war. The US also formalised the provision of nuclear umbrella to south Korea at the 14th session of the US-south Korea annual security consultative meeting held in March 1982.
At the dawn of the 21st century, the US designated our country as a target for pre-emptive nuclear strike in its ‘nuclear posture review’ and shipped into south Korea the warfare equipment worth an astronomical amount of money, along with nuclear weaponry.
The US has deployed in south Korea all sorts of ultra-modern offensive arms such as F-117 stealth fighters, F-15 and F-16 fighters, Shadow 200 tactical reconnaissance drones, Apaches, new-type Patriot missiles, Stryker armoured vehicles, guided missile destroyers, Abrams M1-A2 tanks, ATACMS ground-to-ground missiles, mine-removing armour-protected (MRAP) special vehicles, and even introduced the Thaad system.
Most recently it has introduced F-35A stealth fighters, Global Hawk high-altitude reconnaissance drones, AWACS and many other ultra-modern offensive weapons, thus literally transforming south Korea into a showcase for its lethal weapons industry.
The US went to the length of abolishing both the armistice commission and the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission (NNSC), the only remaining supervisory bodies tasked with implementing the armistice agreement in Korea.
In the 1950s, it dissolved the Neutral Nations Inspection Teams under the NNSC and the Joint Observer Team under the Military Armistice Commission, which had been provided for by paragraph 23, article II of the armistice agreement.
On 25 March 1991, the USA went through the farce of designating as its senior military representative to the MAC a puppet army officer of south Korea, which is not a signatory to the armistice agreement and therefore does not have any qualifications or authority to handle issues relating to it.
With this, the MAC, which had functioned for more than four decades, ceased to exist, and the NNSC too, having lost its counterpart, withered away.
The US also abrogated the preamble and paragraph 12 of the armistice agreement, which provides for a complete cessation of hostilities and of all acts of armed force in Korea.
Since 1954, when it staged operation ‘Focus Lens’, its first joint military exercise with south Korea, the US has conducted endless war drills, including operations ‘Freedom Bolt’, ‘Team Spirit’, ‘Ulji Focus Lens’, ‘Joint Wartime Reinforcement Exercise’, ‘Key Resolve’, ‘Foal Eagle’ and ‘Ulji Freedom Guardian’.
These exercises far exceeded any wargames taking place in other parts of the world, both in terms of frequency and scope. The entirety of the US’s strategic nuclear triad – nuclear aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and nuclear strategic bombers – has been mobilised in these nuclear war drills aimed at the DPRK.
The nature of the exercises has become steadily more aggressive and provocative. Today, the stated aim of such masquerades is openly described as a ‘decapitation operation’, ‘precision strike’, ‘invasion of Pyongyang’, etc, throwing off both the ‘annual’ and ‘defensive’ veneers.
The US further developed its pre-emptive nuclear strike scenarios through Oplan 5026, Oplan 5027, Oplan 5029, Oplan 5030, Oplan 5012, Oplan 5015, Oplan 8044, Oplan 8022, Oplan 8010, the ‘tailored deterrence strategy’ and Oplan 4D.
As is evident from the above, the US left no stone unturned in abrogating each and every article and paragraph of the five articles and 63 paragraphs of the armistice agreement. In truth, that agreement has been dumped like a scrap of waste paper.
Owing to the hostile policy of the US and its endless nuclear threats and blackmail towards the DPRK, the Korean peninsula has been turned into the world’s hottest spot, where nuclear war could be sparked at any moment.
If we in the north had not considerably strengthened our self-defensive deterrence, the Korean peninsula could have fallen into the ravages of war more than a hundred times, and a catastrophic third world war would have already started.
Strengthening the war deterrent is our final option
It is 67 years since the gunfire of war ceased on this land, but there is one thing that has not ceased at all: the hostile policy of the USA towards the DPRK.
The United States is becoming daily more open about its desire to annihilate the DPRK by force and gain military dominance in the Asia-Pacific region, and thus, by extension, to realise its ambition for world hegemony at any cost.
The government of the DPRK has put forward a number of peace proposals and initiatives over the decades, including the proposal (in the 1970s) for concluding a DPRK-US peace agreement and the proposal (in the 1990s) for establishing a new peace mechanism, all of which were rejected outright by the US.
In the second half of the 1990s, four-party talks were held involving the DPRK, the US, China and south Korea, aimed at establishing a durable peace mechanism on the Korean peninsula. Owing to the insincere attitude of the US, however, no fruit was produced by this initiative.
In the new century, we put forward a proposal aimed at formerly ending the war, offering to convene a meeting at the earliest possible date so as to replace the armistice agreement with a peace agreement by 2010, the 60th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean war. Once again, the United States turned down these proposals.
Instead, the US openly designated our country as part of an ‘axis of evil’, an ‘outpost of tyranny’ and a ‘target for a pre-emptive nuclear strike’, illegally labelling us as a ‘sponsor of terrorism’, a site of the ‘proliferation of weapons of mass destruction’, accusing us of ‘human rights abuse’, ‘money laundering’, ‘counterfeiting’, ‘drug trafficking’ and so on in order to justify its hostile policy towards the DPRK.
The US did not even hesitate to make reckless remarks about the ‘total destruction’ of the DPRK, running amok in order to overturn our ideology and system.
The hostile policy of the US towards the DPRK is well evidenced by the fact that it openly threatened us with the use of nuclear weapons.
The US had declared that it would drop atomic bombs on the DPRK during the Korean war, and once again gradually escalated its nuclear threats against us after the conclusion of the armistice agreement.
When its armed spy ship Pueblo was captured in January 1968, the US reviewed the option of a 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 its nuke-mounted tactical bombers on emergency standby while the then US president Richard Nixon made reckless remarks about having decided to approve the use of atomic bombs in case north Korea struck back.
Such public nuclear threats and blackmail by the US towards the DPRK are only the visible tip of a huge iceberg.
The war in Kosovo triggered by the US from March to June 1999 was a war of injustice, simulating a second Korean war.
The former Yugoslavia served as the US test ground for a new Korean war, because the country has natural and geographical conditions similar to the Korean peninsula and its distance from the US mainland is almost the same as the distance between the US mainland and the Korean peninsula.
The fact 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 serve as an oblique illustration of the second Korean war being plotted by the US.
With the turn of a new millennium, the US’s nuclear threats against the DPRK became ever more blatant.
On 6 June 2001, President George HW Bush launched a so-called ‘North Korea policy statement’, in which he claimed that the US would wield its military strength – including nuclear weapons – if the DPRK did not accept the US demand for nuclear inspections, the suspension of missile launches and development, and a reduction in the DPRK’s store of conventional weapons.
In 2002, the US stated that it could be the first to use nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula and that it would develop small nuclear ‘bunker busters’ to this end, thereby making a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the DPRK a fait accompli.
In 2009, at the 41st session of the US-south Korea annual security consultative meeting, the US announced in writing that it would provide extended deterrence for south Korea by means of a nuclear umbrella, conventional strike capabilities and a missile defence system.
American nuclear threats against the DPRK reached a peak in 2017.
The US once more pushed the Korean peninsula to the threshold of nuclear war by deploying nuclear strategic assets and the latest warfare equipment in south Korea and its surrounding areas. Weaponry included the super-large nuclear-powered aircraft carriers Carl Vinson and Ronald Reagan, B-1B, B-52H and B-2A nuclear strategic bombers, and the nuclear-powered submarines Columbus, Tucson and Michigan.
The US’s hostile policy and nuclear threats towards the DPRK became even more aggressive after the DPRK-US summit, held in Singapore with the aim of establishing a new bilateral relationship and building a lasting and durable peace mechanism on the Korean peninsula.
Despite the fact that we voluntarily took crucial and meaningful initiatives – including the discontinuation of nuclear tests and ICBM test-fire – for the sake of building mutual confidence in the talks, the US, far from responding to these initiatives with corresponding measures, conducted tens of joint military drills (which its president had personally promised to stop) and threatened the DPRK militarily, shipping ultra-modern warfare equipment into south Korea.
The US carried out a test simulating the interception of one of our intercontinental ballistic missiles, and followed this with test launches of all kinds of missiles, including the ICBM Minuteman-3 and SLBM Trident 2D-5, thus maximising its nuclear threats against us.
Even in the midst of the unprecedented crisis triggered by Covid-19, the US’s military threats against us have not abated. If anything, they have increased, with the US and south Korea staging a joint air drill and marine corps joint landing drill this April.
No other nation on the planet has suffered from nuclear threats so directly or for so long as the Korean nation, and to our people, such nuclear threats are not an abstract concept but our actual and concrete experience.
Our nation suffered directly from the US nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in which our people were the second-largest victim after the Japanese people.
To our people, who had personally experienced the horrible ravages of the nuclear bomb, the US’s atomic threats were a real nightmare during the Korean war, and gave rise to a procession of ‘A-bomb refugees’, streaming from the north to the south of the Korean peninsula as the war was being waged.
Many families who couldn’t move together sent only their husbands or sons to the south in the hope of carrying on their family lines.
This is how the separated families of millions of people came into being, and they are still living separately in the north and south of the Korean peninsula and abroad.
The DPRK government has made every possible effort to put an end to the US’s nuclear threats, both through dialogue and by making recourse to international law, but all its efforts have been in vain.
The only option left was to counter nuclear with nuclear.
In fact, the United States persistently pushed us into possessing nuclear weapons.
This brought to an end the nuclear imbalance in northeast Asia, where only the DPRK had been left without nukes while every other country had been equipped with nuclear weapons or was protected by a nuclear umbrella.
All this speaks clearly to the fact that the root cause of all problems on the Korean peninsula is the US’s hostile policy and nuclear threats towards the DPRK. The dark cloud of nuclear war can never be cleared away from the Korean peninsula unless the US withdraws the hostile policy that treats the DPRK as an enemy and a belligerent state.
The US might have its own motivations for doggedly persisting in this hostility and belligerence, however.
While the far eastern strategy of the US has shifted over the years in line with the ‘Nixon doctrine’, the ‘Neo-Pacific doctrine’, the ‘Pivot to Asia-Pacific’ strategy and the ‘Indo-Pacific strategy’, the environment surrounding the ceasefire on the Korean peninsula was consistently abused in order to militarily deter any potential adversaries of the US in the region.
In recent years, for example, the US deployed its Thaad high-altitude missile defence system in south Korea under the pretext of a ‘missile threat’ from us, thus enabling it to gain an incredibly close watch over northeastern China and the far east of Russia. Meanwhile, the US is openly demonstrating its evil intention to deploy intermediate-range missiles in our surrounding areas on the grounds that the INF treaty has become null and void.
As a result, it is now only a matter of time before a nuclear arms race is set off around the Korean peninsula as US moves to contain China and Russia militarily grow ever more pronounced.
Under this circumstance, there is no guarantee that a second 25 June won’t be launched in the case that US interests coincide with those of 70 years ago – a far departure from the official line that the US wants to ‘keep the peace’ on the Korean peninsula.
To our people, who were subjected to disastrous disturbances of war on this land owing to US aggression, a strong war deterrent for national defence has become indispensable.
It is an indisputable, open and above-board exercise of the legitimate right to self-defence that we further consolidate our war deterrent, which is aimed at defending our national security and guaranteeing our development.
The 70-year-long history of the DPRK-US confrontation graphically illustrates that no self-restraint or broadmindedness could serve to contain the US’s high-handed arbitrariness, aggression and war manoeuvres, but would, in fact, only encourage the US to go further.
It is despicable double-dealing for the US to talk about dialogue while maximising its attempts to oppress the DPRK politically, economically and militarily. Its repeated harping, like an automatic responding machine, on denuclearisation betrays only its brigandish intention to disarm us and open up the way to another aggressive war.
At the fourth enlarged meeting of the seventh 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 our national nuclear war deterrent and to put our strategic force on full alert, in accordance with our overall need to build and develop the state’s armed forces.
In the present situation, in which the US, the world’s biggest nuclear power and only actual user of nuclear weapons, clings to this pathological and inveterately hostile policy, while indulging in the most extreme nuclear threats and blackmail, we will continue to further build up our strength so as to contain these persistent threats. We will never shrink from the road we have chosen.
Nobody in this world can block the victorious advance of our people and army, who have inherited the heroic spirit and mettle of the great generation of victors who defeated the US-led gang of imperialists in the Fatherland Liberation War – in a de facto confrontation between the rifle and the atomic bomb.
Pyongyang, 25 June, Juche 109 (2020)
