They staged unprecedentedly large-scale joint military exercises Key Resolve and Foal Eagle against the DPRK in March and April and shelling drills in the waters off Paekryong and Yonphyong Islands, joint anti-submarine drills in the West Sea of Korea and the joint naval drills in the East and South seas of Korea in May.

Those drills are an open threat and blackmail against the DPRK and grave military provocations to ignite a fresh war on the peninsula at any cost.

They are also nuclear war drills aimed to mount a preemptive nuclear attack upon the DPRK, to all intents and purposes.

Nuclear war hardware unprecedentedly huge in the world war history has been involved in the drills.

They include B-52s, the nuclear-powered submarine Cheyenne, a Los Angeles-class nuclear-powered submarine, a large Ohio-class nuclear-powered submarine and the nuclear carrier strike force made up of various warships including the super-large carrier Nimitz, an Aegis guided-missile destroyer and a guided-missile cruiser.

Huge strategic nuclear forces based in south Korea and its vicinity have been ready for carrying out a preemptive strike, a total war at any moment.

The danger of a nuclear war has constantly existed on the Korean Peninsula due to the ceaseless war racket of the U.S. aimed at a nuclear preemptive strike at the strategic bases of the DPRK.

Nevertheless, the U.S. is calling those drills "annual ones for defense" for "deterring a provocation". This is nothing but sophism to conceal the danger of their nuclear war drills and to mislead the public opinion.

Now the U.S. is beefing up its war hardware in south Korea.

This year the U.S. is mulling deploying there GBU-28 bombs capable of destroying underground bunkers in the depth of 30 meters, GBU-50 and GBU-54 laser guided-bombs capable of making precision strikes at mobile missile launching pads and a tactical airship assigned to monitor round the clock the territory of the DPRK and the movement of its coastal artillery pieces at an altitude of 10 000 meters.

Such facts go to clearly prove that the U.S. is the arch criminal who has escalated the tension on the peninsula and provocateur and aggressor who has brought the danger of a war to it.

The aim sought by the U.S. in its concentration of nuclear forces on the peninsula and its vicinity is to totally dominate the Asia-Pacific region by encroaching upon the sovereignty of its people and their right to existence and stifling it.

It is not fortuitous that the Chinese paper Liberation Army Daily on May 17 in an article titled "Why is the U.S. adding fuel to the flames?" commented that "the first aim sought by the U.S. is to escalate threat to the DPRK so that the latter takes soft-pedaled behavior, the second is to consolidate its strategy of 'rebalancing the forces in the Asia-Pacific region' and the third is to relieve its allies of their worries by providing them with 'extended deterrence'".

It is nothing but a foolish daydream for the U.S. to try to bring down the DPRK, a full-fledged nuclear weapons state, by such reckless nuclear threat and blackmail.

The present situation on the Korean Peninsula again proves before the world that the DPRK was entirely just when it opted to take practical measures to further consolidate its status as a nuclear weapons state and to bolster up the nuclear deterrence both in quality and quantity true to the line of the Workers' Party of Korea on simultaneously pushing forward economic construction and the building of nuclear force.