North Korea has warned that American actions have forced it to "bolster" its nuclear arsenal, and put its allies at risk of a retaliatory attack by the cornered regime.
On Tuesday, state-run news agency KNCA published an article on the developing military relationship between the U.S., South Korea and Japan, which it termed a "serious tripartite security crisis."
"The strengthened tripartite security cooperation trumpeted by the U.S. has only made the peoples of Japan and the puppet ROK cannon fodder of nuclear war, rather than giving benefits to the two stooges," the commentary read.
The three countries have increased their cooperative endeavors in response to a deteriorating security situation on the Korean Peninsula.
In August of last year, a security framework was signed by the three heads of state, which reaffirmed the U.S.'s "extended deterrence" commitments to the Asian states, pledged to pursue the "complete denuclearization of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea," and promised to coordinate annual trilateral military exercises.
The first of these trilateral exercises took place in late June, during which the air and naval forces of each country participated in drills to test their "cooperative ballistic missile defense" capabilities, as well as defensive cyber training, according to a statement from U.S. Indo-Pacific Command.
The U.S. and South Korea are also set to begin their annual bilateral military exercises, set to run between August 19 and 29.
However, KNCA wrote that this expending alliance "wrecks the balance of force in the region," and that this "is bound to invite strong counteraction of independent states possessed of nuclear weapons."
KNCA also responded to a recent op-ed in The Washington Post, co-authored by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, which deemed Pyongyang's "nuclear saber-rattling" a major U.S. security challenge in the Indo-Pacific.
Concerns are growing over the country's nuclear weapons program, heightened by threats of nuclear escalation from Kim Jong Un's regime.
One expert previously told Newsweek that North Korea has prevailed in its procurement of missile and WMD components, in spite of widespread sanctions meant to curtail its military development programs, and South Korea's former defense minister recently warned that Pyongyang's development of a nuclear weapon "is believed to be in the final stages."
"The DPRK's 'nuclear threat', touted by the U.S., is an inevitable result of the latter's deep-rooted hostile policy toward the former that has lasted decades after decades and generation after generation," KNCA wrote. "It is the U.S. that compelled the DPRK to have access to nuclear weapons and it is none other than the successive U.S. administrations that have pushed the DPRK into bolstering up its nuclear war deterrence."
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