By South China Morning Post | Created at 2024-11-22 03:29:47 | Updated at 2024-11-22 09:03:39
5 hours ago
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has accused the United States of ramping up tension and provocations, saying the Korean peninsula has never faced such risks of nuclear war as now, state media KCNA said on Friday.
In a speech at a military exhibition on Thursday in Pyongyang, Kim said his previous experience of negotiations with Washington only highlighted its “aggressive and hostile” policy against Pyongyang, KCNA said.
“Never before have the warring parties on the Korean peninsula faced such a dangerous and acute confrontation that it could escalate into the most destructive thermonuclear war,” Kim said, according to KCNA.
“We have already gone as far as we can on negotiating with the United States, but what we became certain of from the result is not the superpower’s willingness to coexist, but its thorough stance of power and aggressive and hostile policy toward us that can never change.”
During US president-elect Donald Trump’s first term, he and Kim held three unprecedented meetings in Singapore, Hanoi, and at the Korean border in 2018 and 2019.
But their diplomacy failed to achieve any concrete outcome due to differences between US calls for North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons and Kim’s demands for sanctions relief.
