"Nuclear war may break out any moment"

The situation on the Korean peninsula has reached the touch-and-go point and a nuclear war may break out any moment, the Deputy Permanent Representative of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea to the UN, Kim In Ryong, said at the meeting of the the UN general assembly’s disarmament committee.

According to him, "unless the hostile policy and the nuclear threat of the US is thoroughly eradicated, we will never put our nuclear weapons and ballistic rockets on the negotiating table under any circumstances".

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-defence.

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”.

Kim said that this year 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.

North Korea’s deputy UN ambassador called his country’s nuclear and missile arsenal “a precious strategic asset that cannot be reversed or bartered for anything”.

"The DPRK consistently supports the total elimination of nuclear weapons and the efforts for denuclearisation of the entire world. But as long as the United States rejected the treaty and “constantly threatens and blackmails the DPRK with nuclear weapons … the DPRK is not in position to accede to the treaty," the Guardian cited the ambassador as saying.

The director of the Roosevelt Fund of Study of the US at Moscow State University, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Yuri Rogulev, speaking with a correspondent of Vestnik Kavkaza, noted that neither the US nor the DPRK are ready to strike the first blow. "Any provocation with the threat of use of nuclear weapons brings the conflict closer, but the question is how much. North Korea constantly makes such statements - but these are precisely provocations, not attempts to unleash a nuclear war. They understand that it would be suicidal for them. The United States may not be affected, but their nearest allies, Japan and South Korea, will be in the zone of defeat. I do not think that the US is ready to sacrifice its allies in order to destroy North Korea," he pointed out.

In this regard, we should not expect that the world is about to be on the verge of a nuclear war. "The conflict has lasted for more than a decade. The war was stopped in 1953, since then there has been no peace treaty, only an armistice agreement, that is, the war is still not over. The United States has already fought in Korea once, and there was no victory. So it's hard to believe that Washington will start fighting again, especially since President Trump is going to visit the countries of Asia, including Japan and Korea, in November. There will be no special actions at that time. But the conflict needs to be settled somehow, otherwise it is unknown what it may end," Yury Rogulev warned.

The Director of the Center for Studies of Eastern Asia and the SCO of the Institute for International Studies of MGIMO, Alexander Lukin, in turn, noted that the statement of the DPRK is a bluff and intimidation. "They will not be the first to strike. They are not suicides. If North Korea strikes first, it will be destroyed quickly, and it is aware of this," the expert explained.

According to him, there is no threat of nuclear war in the foreseeable future. "North Korea wants to create nuclear weapons as a deterrent to maintain its regime. The United States has pursued different policies over the past decades, but nothing has been invented to prevent the Koreans from doing so. Now Trump decided to intimidate and hysterically scream. But he can scream for another 10 years, and the DPRK will continue to gradually create more and more effective nuclear weapons," the Director of the Center for Studies of Eastern Asia and the SCO of the Institute for International Studies of MGIMO said.

At the same time, he noted that the US won't be able to prevent this, because it is fraught with too much loss. "Seoul, the capital of South Korea, is 40 km from the demarcation line. And even if North Korea does not use nuclear weapons, half the city will be destroyed, and about 10 million people live there. In addition, there are many Americans in South Korea. If the US thinks about a nuclear solution, they will start with the evacuation of the Americans, if this measure is carried out, then, therefore, they really have something in mind," Alexander Lukin concluded.