North Korea’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations warned yesterday, “The situation on the Korean peninsula is on the brink of explosion and nobody knows when the war will break out.”
Deputy Ambassador Ri Dong Il was responding to the annual report by IAEA Director General Amano Yukiya, who outlined his organization’s concerns regarding Iranian and North Korean nuclear developments in a speech to the UN General Assembly in New York City.
Expressing the depth of his concerns, Amano had said that North Korea’s “statements about uranium enrichment activities and the construction of a light water reactor are deeply troubling.”
Dismissing the concerns, Deputy Ambassador Ri underscored, “Now, if you look at the current situation and developments on the Korean Peninsula, the United States did not hesitate to escalate, aggravate, increase its threats and blackmail with increased hostilities toward the DPRK.”
“North Korea is a nuclear weapon state,” he went on. “We should be treated equally with the U.S. and other nuclear weapons states that do not get investigated for their nuclear activities by the IAEA.”
“Because the IAEA is blindly always on the side of the U.S., North Korea does not want to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or IAEA. The IAEA is not doing anything for East Asia,” he concluded, adding that the Six-Party Talks are “almost dead at this point.”
