Rejecting any possibility of abandoning its nuclear program, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's Vice Foreign Minister Kim Son Gyong told the United Nations General Assembly on Monday that such a demand is "tantamount to demanding it to surrender sovereignty and right to existence."

The diplomat is the first official sent from the DPRK to address the high-level UN General Assembly since 2018.

"Imposition of 'denuclearization' on the DPRK is tantamount to demanding it to surrender sovereignty and right to existence and violate the Constitution," Vice FM Kim Son Gyong stated, adding, "We will never give up sovereignty, abandon the right to existence and violate the Constitution."

"Thanks to our state's enhanced physical war deterrent in direct proportion to the growing threat of aggression of the US and its allies, the will of the enemy states to provoke a war is thoroughly contained and the balance of power on the Korean peninsula is ensured," the DPRK Vice FM added.

The vice foreign minister told the UN General Assembly that the DPRK would never relinquish its nuclear program, which he noted is a matter of state law, national policy, sovereign power, and the right to existence. He asserted that under any circumstances, they would never deviate from this position.

Wider context

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea has been under UN Security Council sanctions since 2006, sanctions which have been steadily strengthened over the years with the aim of halting Pyongyang's development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

According to a state media report on September 15, the DPRK declared its status as a nuclear-armed state to be both "permanently enshrined" in its law and "irreversible", while condemning the United States for its demands for denuclearization.

"Recently, at a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency's Board of Governors, the US once again committed a grave political provocation by branding our possession of nuclear weapons as illegal and clamouring about denuclearisation," the DPRK's UN mission said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

The DPRK statement emphasized that the IAEA possesses neither the legal mandate nor the ethical grounds to meddle in the internal affairs of a sovereign nuclear state that is not a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.