| The Counselor of the Permanent Mission of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea(DPRK) to the United Nations Office at Geneva and Other International Organizations in Switzerland delivered a statement at the First Part meeting of the Conference on Disarmament(CD) on January 21. Saying that in light of the current complex international security environment, the Conference on Disarmament, as a single multilateral negotiating forum for disarmament, assumes an important task to address the challenges to international peace and security, he stated as follows. In the last two years, the DPRK took crucial initiatives to halt its nuclear test and ICBM test-fire and shut down the nuclear test ground in order to build confidence between the DPRK and the U.S. However, the U.S., far from responding to these initiatives with an appropriate measure, conducted scores of big and small joint military drills which its President personally promised to stop, threatened the DPRK militarily by introducing ultra-modern warfare equipment into south Korea and took more than ten unilateral measures on sanctions against the DPRK. At the DPRK-U.S. talks, the U.S. raised demands which run counter to the fundamental interests of our state and ultimately ignored the year-end deadline that we set for the U.S. to come up with new method of calculation. The U.S. behavior turned out to throw a wet blanket over our efforts for global nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation. Though the U.S. is talking about resumption of dialogue, its real intention is not at all to drop its hostile policy toward the DPRK and resolve the issues through improved relations, but to seek its own political and diplomatic interests while wasting time away under the signboard of dialogue and negotiations and, at the same time, maintain sanctions for gradually exhausting our strength. As it has become clear that the U.S. remains unchanged in its ambition to block the development of the DPRK and stifle its political system, we found no reason to be unilaterally bound any longer by the commitment that the other party fails to honour. If the U.S. persists in such a hostile policy toward the DPRK, there will never be a denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. As Kim Jong Un , Chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the DPRK, has made clear in his historic report to the Fifth Plenary Meeting of the Seventh Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea last year, the DPRK will never exchange its security and dignity and its future safety for anything else. He continued to stress that the DPRK will steadily develop the strategic weapons essential and prerequisite for its national security until the U.S. abandons its hostile policy and a lasting and durable peace mechanism is in place on the Korean peninsula and the scope and depth of the buildup of the deterrent will be properly coordinated depending on the future attitude of the U.S. toward the DPRK. |