SpaceWar.com reports: “North Korea on Monday vowed to ‘steadily update and strengthen’ its nuclear arsenal, rejecting a joint statement by the Group of Seven Foreign Ministers calling for Pyongyang to give up its nuclear ambitions.

The North’s Foreign Ministry said its position as a nuclear weapons state has been ‘fixed permanently by the supreme law of its state.’

‘The DPRK’s nuclear armed forces will exist forever as a powerful means of justice which defends the sovereignty of the state, territorial integrity and fundamental interests, prevents a war in the Korean peninsula and Northeast Asia and guarantees a strategic stability of the world,’ the ministry said in a statement carried by state-run Korean Central News Agency.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is the official name of North Korea.

‘The DPRK will steadily update and strengthen its nuclear armed forces both in quality and quantity in response to the nuclear threat from outside,’ it added.

In September 2022, the North passed a law declaring itself a nuclear weapons state and giving it the right to conduct a preemptive nuclear strike to protect itself. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un called the decision ‘irreversible’ and later amended the country’s constitution to enshrine the permanent growth of Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal…”