North Korea has denounced South Korea's plan to acquire nuclear-powered submarines, saying it "will help realize a dangerous nuclear ambition that extends even to securing nuclear weapons."
According to the Korean Central News Agency, the North Korean Foreign Ministry made the remarks in a statement on the 29th, saying that "U.S.-South Korea cooperation on nuclear submarines, carried out under the banner of using low-enriched uranium fuel, will in the end help realize South Korea's dangerous nuclear ambition of securing the right to enrich weapons-grade nuclear material and even nuclear weapons themselves."
The ministry pointed to the United States, which approved South Korea's acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines, as "the chief culprit of vertical proliferation that is bringing a global nuclear nightmare." It argued that South Korea's possession of nuclear submarines amounts to "a dangerous development that adds new instability to the political and military security environment of the Asia-Pacific region." The ministry also said that by approving uranium enrichment activities in the 2015 negotiations to revise the bilateral nuclear energy agreement, the United States "gave a green light to South Korea's nuclear ambition to vault itself into the status of a 'quasi-nuclear state.'"
Citing specific figures on the scale of U.S. nuclear weapons holdings dating back to the first American nuclear test in 1945 and on the course of nuclear disarmament talks with the former Soviet Union, the ministry said the United States is undermining the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty signed in 1968. It said U.S. nuclear weapons deployed in the Asia-Pacific region, including in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Taiwan, rose from about 1,700 around 1960 to about 3,200 in 1967, and that some 1,720 had been deployed in South Korea by 1985.
The ministry took particular aim at a new U.S. nuclear strategy that gives greater weight to tactical nuclear weapons, saying it "shows that these are being positioned openly as practical weapons for battlefield use in a contingency, rather than as display-purpose 'deterrents' aimed at 'removing threats' from adversaries."
At the same time, the ministry justified North Korea's own nuclear arsenal. "Today's geopolitical situation, in which the international nuclear order has reached a state of total collapse due to the radical buildup of U.S. nuclear forces and blatant acts of nuclear proliferation, demands that our state play a more active role in safeguarding world peace and global strategic stability," it said. It added that "the choice of action by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea as a responsible nuclear weapons state will be thoroughly grounded in the grave reality that no international organization or international treaty is able to rein in the United States' reinforcement of nuclear forces and its schemes for nuclear proliferation, which have gone beyond all limits."
