A senior North Korean government official said Thursday Pyongyang would reciprocate by taking "a confident step" if Washington takes a practical measure to end its hostile policy towards the country. Deputy Director of North Korea's Institute for Disarmament and Peace, Ri Kwang Il, said there was no change in the stand of North Korea to maintain the goal of denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula, implement the joint statement of the fourth round of the Six-Party Talks and seek a peaceful solution to the nuclear issue through dialogue."(However), in order to solve the security issue of the Korean peninsula, the US should make a prompt decision to abandon its hostile policy towards North Korea," he told the Malaysia and East Asia Conference, organised by the Malaysian Strategic Research Centre (MSRC) here, today.
The US has accused Pyongyang of developing nuclear weapons and has declared North Korea an outpost of "tyranny" and a "criminal state", making it more difficult for a solution to the nuclear issue and other related issues, which is being pursued through the Six-Party Talks.
Kwang Il stressed that a pressing issue now to ensure peace and stability on the Korean peninsula was to put an end to the existence of the "US forces illegally stationed in South Korea".Kwang Il said the US security strategy in Northeast Asia -- to maintain the structure of the Cold War era -- was the main stumbling block that threatened the security of the Korean peninsula and Northeast Asia. Kwang Il also accused the US of continuously renewing its plans to invade North Korea, thus bringing the situation on the Korean peninsula to the brink of war.
"The US war plan to invade North Korea mapped out with utmost secrecy out of its aggressive doctrine of `pre-emptive strike' has been designed to launch unilateral attack against us to destroy our nuclear facilities through an air raid and infiltration operation of the special unit," he said.
He claimed that at the end of last year, the US had decided to deploy its latest nuclear carrier, George Washington, at its naval base in Yokosuka, Japan, and "staged extremely dangerous exercises for nuclear pre-emptive attack aimed at North Korea from Nov 1 till Nov 10, 2005".
"The US dramatised the dangerous nuclear war scenarios to use 30 nuclear bombs in `case of emergency' in the Korean peninsula and conducted simulation exercises of dropping the nuclear bomb," added Kwang I1.