SEOUL: North Korea condemned the United States and its \u200ballies on Saturday for what it called strengthening military blocs and accelerating arms buildups after a NATO summit this week.<\/p>\n
Pyongyang accused NATO leaders of portraying North Korea\u2019s exercise of its legitimate sovereign rights as a threat, the foreign ministry said in a statement carried on state media KCNA.<\/p>\n
The alliance demonstrated a stronger commitment to bloc-to-bloc confrontation through \u200cincreased arms spending \u200cand closer military cooperation with allies \u200bin \u200cthe \u2060Asia-Pacific region, \u200bthe ministry \u2060said.<\/p>\n
At the NATO summit in Turkiye on Tuesday, officials announced more than $50 billion in military procurement and industrial agreements as European allies face continued pressure from US President Donald Trump to shoulder a greater share of the alliance\u2019s defense burden.<\/p>\n
President Lee Jae Myung of Pyongyang\u2019s rival South Korea said on \u2060the sidelines of the summit that \u200che hoped Seoul would expand cooperation \u200cwith NATO allies in research and development, \u200bincluding in cutting-edge technologies, \u200cand in production of weapons systems.<\/p>\n
North Korea said the \u200csummit showed that NATO was a body geared toward war and confrontation, pursuing what Pyongyang described as exclusive geopolitical interests at the expense of peace and security in Europe and the Asia-Pacific.<\/p>\n
Pyongyang, which \u200csays a push by the West for it to abandon nuclear weapons has been irreversibly \u2060terminated, \u2060believes instead that denuclearization efforts should focus first on what it described as attempts by South Korea and Japan to pursue their own nuclear weapons under US protection, as well as the nuclear ambitions of NATO members participating in the alliance\u2019s nuclear-sharing arrangements, the ministry said.<\/p>\n
It said North Korea would safeguard its sovereignty and security interests, as well as regional peace, through the responsible exercise of its sovereign rights.<\/p>\n
KCNA said on Friday that North Korea had \u200bdecided on measures to strengthen \u200bits nuclear forces \u201cquantitatively and qualitatively\u201d as leader Kim Jong Un calls for modernizing its military.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
SEOUL: North Korea condemned the United States and its \u200ballies on Saturday for what it called strengthening military blocs and accelerating arms buildups after a NATO summit this week. Pyongyang accused NATO leaders of portraying North Korea\u2019s exercise of its legitimate sovereign rights as a threat, the foreign ministry said in a statement carried on …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":100159,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100142"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":100160,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100142\/revisions\/100160"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}