North Korea Warns South Korea's Nuclear Submarines Will 'Realize Nuclear Ambitions'

North Korea claimed that the U.S. buildup of nuclear forces and extended deterrence for allies constitute the "horizontal proliferation" of nuclear weapons, asserting that the United States is the prime culprit disrupting the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) regime.

In a memorandum released through the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) today (September 29), North Korea's Foreign Ministry stated that the NPT regime serves as "a tool to justify U.S. nuclear threats against weaker nations" and is being "violently distorted and misinterpreted by the U.S. itself."

The ministry defined the U.S. approval of South Korea's possession of nuclear-powered submarines as a "dangerous development that adds new instability to the political and military security environment in the Asia-Pacific region."

It expressed wariness, stating that the U.S. had "given the green light to South Korea's nuclear ambitions to leap forward into a 'quasi-nuclear state'" by approving uranium enrichment activities during the 2015 negotiations to revise their bilateral civil nuclear agreement.

It also made the far-fetched claim that "the U.S.-South Korea nuclear submarine cooperation under the banner of using low-enriched uranium fuel will ultimately realize South Korea's dangerous nuclear ambition of securing rights to enrich weapons-grade nuclear materials and even acquiring nuclear weapons."

North Korea further claimed that the U.S. had previously handed over technologies that could be diverted for nuclear weapons development through the 1956 civil nuclear agreement signed with South Korea, and deliberately covered up circumstances surrounding the extraction of plutonium from South Korean reactors in 1998 and 2003.

(Photo: Yonhap News)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.