North Korea officially warned the United States that, if there were another war on the Korean Peninsula, no Americans would be left alive to sign a surrender document.
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The deal, in return for lifting USA, European Union and United Nations sanctions which have crippled its financial system, stipulates that Iran should settle for lengthy-time period limits on its nuclear programme. With this landmark deal, South Korean politicians were optimistic that it would compel Kim Jong-Un of North Korea to consider denuclearization as a viable option, should the right incentives be offered.
The country is in the midst of celebrating the 62nd anniversary of the armistice agreement that put a decades-long freeze on the Korean War.
In addition, while celebrating the anniversary of the Korean War that took the lives of more than 54,000 American soldiers sixty-two years ago, North Korean officials claim they were victorious.
The deal reached with Iran was touted by some as a possible blueprint for eventual negotiations with North Korea, with US Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman saying she hoped it would give Pyongyang “second thoughts” about the nuclear path it was pursuing.
Despite North Korea’s refusal to negotiate, Seiler, said that the U.S.is open to negotiate when the country is ready to do so.
Seiler is on a trip to the region that will include stops in China and Japan, is the latest in a series of visits by US nuclear envoys aimed at trying to jump start the North Korean talks which broke down in 2008.
North Korea “is a nuclear weapons state both in name and reality and it has interests as a nuclear weapons state”, he said.
South Korea’s Yonhap News agency reported that the DPRK had erected a new, taller launch tower at its missile base.
Earlier, the state’s leader and his senior ranking officials had ramped up their anti-US rhetoric to mark the occasion, urging younger generations to inherit the spirit of defending North Korea as shown by war veterans.
“It has been increasingly clear that North Korea won’t change course as North Korea has rejected any dialogue on its nuclear program”, the source said.
At a separate gathering held Sunday, Korean People’s Army Gen. Pak Yong Sik, who is believed to be the country’s new defense minister, said that if the United States does not abandon its hostile policies toward Pyongyang and provokes another war, the North is prepared to fight until “there would be no one left to sign a surrender document”.
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“It is more than 60 years since the ceasefire on (the) land, but peace has not yet settled on it”, he told the meeting, which included high-level officials, veterans and diplomats stationed in Pyongyang.
