N. Korea rejects UNSC resolution for nuke-free world
Oct. 1, 2009
North Korea on Wednesday rejected a U.N. Security Council resolution seeking to create a world free of nuclear weapons, urging the United States to eliminate its nuclear weapons first to achieve that goal.
''We totally reject UNSC Resolution 1887, too, as it is peppered with the hegemonic ambitions of nuclear powers and will not be bound to it at all,'' a Foreign Ministry spokesman was quoted as saying by the official Korean Central News Agency.
The U.S.-sponsored resolution, adopted at a landmark summit of the U.N. Security Council's 15 member nations last Thursday in New York, calls on countries to sign and ratify the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, and to refrain from conducting nuclear tests.
''The recent resolution deals with the unilateral demands of the nuclear powers to be met by other countries while disregarding the important realistic issues,'' the unidentified spokesman was quoted as saying in the KCNA report.
''It is, therefore, nothing but a sinister scheme of the nuclear powers to maintain the sphere of their domination through their nuclear monopoly under the signboard of global denuclearization,'' he said.
The spokesman called the resolution ''a double-standards document,'' saying it ''failed to fully reflect the desire and will of the world community as a whole.''
It was the first time North Korea has made public its position on the new U.N. Security Council resolution.
The spokesman did not refer to the stalled six-party talks aimed at denuclearizing North Korea, which involve North and South Korea, the United States, China, Japan and Russia.
North Korea declared its withdrawal from the multilateral dialogue last April after the U.N. Security Council denounced its earlier rocket launch that was widely regarded as a missile test. The following month, it conducted its second nuclear test.
The spokesman called it ''unimaginable to expect'' North Korea to return to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as ''a non-nuclear state'' as the NPT has failed to play any role in preventing the U.S. forward-deployment of nuclear weapons in South Korea and its rising nuclear threat to the North.
He said that to achieve global denuclearization, a ''prerequisite'' is for the United States -- the country with the biggest stockpile of nuclear weapons -- to reduce and eliminate them.
North Korea, he said, has no choice but to stick to its nuclear deterrent to safeguard regional peace and security as well as its national interest in the face of U.S. nuclear threat for more than half a century.
(Distributed by Kyodo News on Sept. 30, 2009)
''We totally reject UNSC Resolution 1887, too, as it is peppered with the hegemonic ambitions of nuclear powers and will not be bound to it at all,'' a Foreign Ministry spokesman was quoted as saying by the official Korean Central News Agency.
The U.S.-sponsored resolution, adopted at a landmark summit of the U.N. Security Council's 15 member nations last Thursday in New York, calls on countries to sign and ratify the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, and to refrain from conducting nuclear tests.
''The recent resolution deals with the unilateral demands of the nuclear powers to be met by other countries while disregarding the important realistic issues,'' the unidentified spokesman was quoted as saying in the KCNA report.
''It is, therefore, nothing but a sinister scheme of the nuclear powers to maintain the sphere of their domination through their nuclear monopoly under the signboard of global denuclearization,'' he said.
The spokesman called the resolution ''a double-standards document,'' saying it ''failed to fully reflect the desire and will of the world community as a whole.''
It was the first time North Korea has made public its position on the new U.N. Security Council resolution.
The spokesman did not refer to the stalled six-party talks aimed at denuclearizing North Korea, which involve North and South Korea, the United States, China, Japan and Russia.
North Korea declared its withdrawal from the multilateral dialogue last April after the U.N. Security Council denounced its earlier rocket launch that was widely regarded as a missile test. The following month, it conducted its second nuclear test.
The spokesman called it ''unimaginable to expect'' North Korea to return to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as ''a non-nuclear state'' as the NPT has failed to play any role in preventing the U.S. forward-deployment of nuclear weapons in South Korea and its rising nuclear threat to the North.
He said that to achieve global denuclearization, a ''prerequisite'' is for the United States -- the country with the biggest stockpile of nuclear weapons -- to reduce and eliminate them.
North Korea, he said, has no choice but to stick to its nuclear deterrent to safeguard regional peace and security as well as its national interest in the face of U.S. nuclear threat for more than half a century.
(Distributed by Kyodo News on Sept. 30, 2009)
