SEOUL: North Korea on Tuesday demanded to be recognized as a nuclear weapons state, a state newspaper reported, in a defiant show of the country refusing to agree to US conditions on their nuclear arms.
The North’s Rodong Sinmun newspaper rejected the US and South Korean condition “as groundless and unacceptable” that it agrees to dismantle its nuclear weapons and suspend missile launches, according to a Reuters report.
“If the DPRK sits at a table with the US, it has to be a dialogue between nuclear weapons states, not one side forcing the other to dismantle nuclear weapons,” the newspaper said, referring to the North by its official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
After weeks of tension on the Korean peninsula, including North Korean threats of nuclear war, the North has in recent days begun to at least talk about dialogue in response to calls for talks from both the United States and South Korea.
