Kim Song, North Korea's permanent representative to the United Nations, who is currently attending the monthlong NPT review conference in New York, said that the country is "not bound by the NPT in any case," according to state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
"I denounce and reject in the strongest tone the brigandish and shameless acts of the specific countries including the U.S. which are taking issue with the [North’s] realistic and just access to nuclear weapons through the legal route and exercise of its inherent defensive rights as a sovereign state," Kim added, describing his country as a "nuclear weapons state outside the treaty."
He also claimed, "The position of [North Korea] as a nuclear weapons state does not change in accordance with rhetorical assertion or unilateral desire of outsiders."
Defending North Korea's withdrawal from the NPT, he also accused the U.S. and its Western allies of committing "a wanton violation of the spirit of the treaty and a total disregard of the purpose and principle of international law" by pressuring Pyongyang to comply with its obligations under the treaty.
But he said his country would remain "faithful" to the principle of using nuclear energy peacefully and to the obligation to prevent nuclear proliferation "in a most transparent way," unlike the U.S. and some other countries, which he accused of "neglecting the obligations to nuclear disarmament as the signatories to the NPT and resorting to such proliferation acts as offer of 'extended deterrence' and transfer of nuclear submarine technology to non-nuclear states."
Adopted by the UN in 1968, the NPT is an international pledge to curb the spread of nuclear weapons. North Korea declared its withdrawal from the treaty in 1993.
Now in its eleventh year, the conference, which began on April 27 and runs until May 22, is held every five years to assess how the treaty has been implemented.
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