59 years have passed since the Korean Armistice Agreement (AA) was signed but the war has not been terminated technically.

By nature, AA was a transitional step which specified that negotiations should be held at a political level within three months with an aim to have all foreign forces withdrawn from the Korean Peninsula and ensure a durable peace there.

But the U.S. deliberately opted to keep the truce long. In November 1953 it defined it as the final goal to realize the "pro-American unification" of the Korean Peninsula. The U.S. also adopted the "National Security Council Resolution 170" to make south Korea its "military ally" while keeping the armistice system until the goal is attained.

Pursuant to it, the U.S. disrupted the Geneva meeting for a peaceful settlement of the Korean issue, massively shipped into south Korea modern weapons including nuclear weapons in violation of AA and has consistently staged war maneuvers under various codenames.

It has persistently avoided the conclusion of a peace agreement and kept the state of belligerency on the Korean Peninsula. This is the most typical expression of its hostile policy toward the DPRK.

It has systematically scrapped major provisions of AA, steadily increased military and nuclear threats to the DPRK and in the long run compelled it to have access to nuclear weapons.

The unstable truce between the DPRK and the United States has persisted on the Korean Peninsula for 59 years. This is a very abnormal situation unprecedented in the world history of wars.

The second Korean war has been headed off in the Korean Peninsula in which the two sides stand in the most acute military stand-off. It would have been unthinkable without the DPRK's Songun politics and effective war deterrent based on self-defensive nuclear forces. Those countries without nuclear deterrent were brought down without exception in face of military intervention of hostile forces aimed at toppling social systems. This is a stark reality in the present century.

The DPRK will never abandon nuclear deterrent first as long as the U.S., the biggest nuclear weapons state in the world, remains hostile toward the former.

Had the U.S. sincerely implemented any one of its commitments to AA, the resolution of the 30th UN General Assembly session on having the U.S. forces withdrawn from south Korea and the DPRK-U.S. agreements in which it promised not to antagonize the DPRK, a durable peace would have settled on the Korean Peninsula and the situation would not have reached the brink of a nuclear war as today.

It is the consistent stand of the DPRK to settle the problems through dialogue and negotiations but all the dialogues cannot but be "ones for the sake of dialogue" unless the U.S. rolls back its hostile policy. This is the review of the nearly 60-year-long history of armistice.

The U.S. should not just claim that it does not have any hostile intention to the DPRK in words but prove it in such practical actions as making a bold decision to replace AA with a peace agreement without any excuse or precondition.

To abandon the hostile policy cannot be a "present" or bargaining in any case. The U.S. hostile policy toward the DPRK must be rolled back first unconditionally as it is unreasonable and anachronistic. Only when one party does not antagonize the other party and when they sit face to face on an equal footing, will it be possible to have dialogue in the true sense of the word and settle all problems of mutual concern.

One way of solving the problem is to sign a peace agreement with the U.S. and another one is to root out the cause of war from the Korean Peninsula for a durable peace.

The ball is in the court of the U.S.