The DPRK Foreign Ministry called the Group of Seven (G7) a "nuclear group" and called on member states to give up nuclear weapons, the Korean Central News Agency reported.
The comment was prompted by a meeting of G7 foreign ministers, at which Western countries "found faults in the fair use of the DPRK's sovereign right" and spoke about its denuclearization. Pyongyang considers such calls provocative, since the country's nuclear status is enshrined in the constitution.
"The DPRK Foreign Ministry expresses serious concern that the G7 countries - the instigators of the violation of global peace and security, the international regime of non-proliferation of nuclear weapons - have questioned the right of a sovereign state to possess legitimate means of deterring war," the statement said. Pyongyang points to the concept of joint use of nuclear weapons and extended deterrence as examples of violations of the non-proliferation regime.
The DPRK Foreign Ministry recalled that the United States is the only country in the world that has used a nuclear bomb and is "the first proliferator of nuclear weapons". According to the diplomatic department, Washington is creating a crisis with the threat of a nuclear clash on the Korean Peninsula and in Europe. As Pyongyang pointed out, Britain is once again trying to "insert American nuclear weapons into its country" and is transferring technology for building nuclear submarines to a non-nuclear state.
American nuclear weapons are located in Germany and Italy. France, raising the issue of "providing a nuclear umbrella" to Western European countries, "creates another worrying possibility of nuclear weapons proliferation in the region". Japan, as the DPRK Foreign Ministry points out, "received nuclear weapons from the United States" in the form of expanded deterrence and “effectively elevated relations with the United States to the level of a nuclear alliance“.
"All these facts show that it is the G-7, represented by the US and its satellite allies, that is the source of the emergence and aggravation of the international nuclear crisis, and that "complete and irreversible renunciation of nuclear weapons" must begin in the G-7," the people's republic said. The DPRK's nuclear forces guarantee the country's sovereignty and territorial integrity and act as “a deterrent against war on the Korean Peninsula“. “The DPRK will tirelessly upgrade and strengthen its nuclear armed forces in qualitative and quantitative terms in line with the external nuclear threat“, Pyongyang noted.