North Korea condemned planned summertime military drills by the US and South Korea and vowed to exercise its right to self-defense, state media reported, days after Pyongyang conducted its second missile test in less than a week.
“It is our consistent principle of ensuring security to respond to a new level of a threat with a new level of a deterrent,” a spokesperson for North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried Friday by the official Korean Central News Agency.
The US and South Korea are set to start their combined military exercises from Aug. 17, incorporating new lessons North Korea is expected to have gained from participating in Russia’s war against Ukraine.
“The DPRK will not tolerate the grave confrontational situation which is being created by the enemy states,” the North Korean statement said. DPRK stands for the North’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
North Korea on Wednesday fired a ballistic missile off its east coast, six days after launching a short-range ballistic missile. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned that North Korea could send more troops and missiles to support Russia. He said tens of thousands of additional North Korean soldiers are preparing to be deployed and asked South Korea to send air defense systems to help Ukraine.
In a separate statement, North Korea condemned a US nuclear strategy under review, accusing Washington of using “nuclear weapons as a main means for attaining hegemonic and aggressive political and military purposes for a long time.”
“The US new nuclear doctrine is a serious dangerous factor as it destroys the nuclear balance in the world, escalates a nuclear arms race and drives global security environment into the threshold of a nuclear war,” the statement said.
Speaking to reporters on Thursday, US Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby said that he doesn’t see radical changes in the nuclear strategy under review.
The US-South Korean joint military exercises are scheduled to run through Aug. 27.
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