North Korea Says Nuclear War May Break Out, US Conducts Drills

Kim In-ryong told the UN general assembly’s disarmament committee that North Korea is the only country in the world that has been subjected to “such an extreme and direct nuclear threat” from the United States since the 1970s and said the country has the right to possess nuclear weapons in self-defense.

He pointed to large-scale military exercises every year using “nuclear assets” and said what is more dangerous is what he called a US plan to stage a “secret operation aimed at the removal of our supreme leadership”.

This year, Kim said, North Korea completed its “state nuclear force and thus became the full-fledged nuclear power which possesses the delivery means of various ranges, including the atomic bomb, H-bomb and intercontinental ballistic rockets”.

“The entire US mainland is within our firing range and if the US dares to invade our sacred territory even an inch it will not escape our severe punishment in any part of the globe,” he warned.

The warning by Pyongyang comes as the US military said on Monday that it would practice evacuating noncombatant Americans out of South Korea in the event of war and other emergencies, as the two allies began a joint naval exercise amid heightened tensions with North Korea.

It has conducted similar evacuation exercises for decades. But with fears rising in the South that the United States might be preparing for military action against the North, the American military issued a rare news release on Monday stressing that the noncombatant evacuation exercise was a “routinely scheduled” drill.

Over the last few months ,there has been an unprecedented escalation of sabre rattling between the US President Donald Trump and North Korea leader Kim Jong-un raising fears that war is imminent.

The current tensions on the Korean Peninsula started following increased provocations by the US which includes military drills and deployment of warships and submarines in the region.

Pyongyang insists that developing its military defenses including nuclear weapons is important to counter incessant provocations by the US including a possible nuclear aggression