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TOKYO: North Korea on Saturday responded to criticism of its latest missile launch with a fierce rebuttal saying, “It is our right to thoroughly suppress and crush the most hostile and most threatening US policy of anti-Korean nuclear confrontation.”

The Korean Central News Agency reported a statement from Kim Yo Jong, Deputy Director of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, in which he said such launches are “the right of self-defense to protect the Korean peninsula and the Asia-Pacific region from the ravages of nuclear war.”

He accused the United Nations of “turning a blind eye to our nation’s legitimate security concerns and the United States’ criminal intent to increase the actual likelihood of a nuclear war breaking out on the Korean Peninsula and surrounding areas.”

“The military provocation by the United States to enter the Korean Peninsula with nuclear submarines equipped with strategic nuclear weapons poses the most direct threat to the security of all Northeast Asian countries.”

Kim Yo Jong went on to accuse the United States’ of carrying out “maneuvers to annihilate our nation” and laid much of the blame at the door of the United Nations Security Council for “consciously ignoring the dangerous nuclear threats and blackmail of the United States.”

The North Korean official warned that, “if the first ever nuclear war that no one wishes for occurs on the Korean Peninsula, the responsibility will be borne by the United Nations Security Council, which has tried to suppress the exercise of the right of self-defense by our nation on the shoulder of the United States.”