The DPRK's sincere efforts to ensure peace and stability of the Korean Peninsula are now faced with a grave challenge.

The U.S. let its nuclear carrier George Washington get involved in the joint naval maneuvers to be staged by it with Japanese and south Korean forces in the South Sea of Korea.

Gravity of the situation is that the military drills started right after U.S. military authorities flew into south Korea and officially announced "tailored deterrence strategy" targeted against the DPRK, fostering military confrontation and war hysteria.

The strategy calls for stifling the DPRK by mobilizing all military forces including conventional armed forces of the U.S. and puppet south Korea and missile defense system, not content with the offer of a nuclear umbrella to south Korea by the U.S., the world's biggest possessor of nuclear weapons. It is, in essence, a plan to increase nuclear threat to the DPRK and mount a preemptive nuclear strike at it.

The military drills planned against this backdrop are a serious military provocation against the DPRK and an outright challenge to the efforts made by the DPRK for peace.

The DPRK has made positive efforts to check the vicious cycle of tensions and create peaceful environment essential for building an economic power and improving the standard of people's living.

It made a series of dialogue proposals on its own initiative prompted by the desire to ensure peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and denuclearize it through dialogue and negotiations. It exercised utmost restraint when the U.S. held Ulji Freedom Guardian military exercises with the puppet south Korean forces with the involvement of a nuclear strategic bomber in August.

Now the U.S. is staging nuclear war exercises by introducing nuclear carrier, rendering the situation extremely tense.

The situation proves that it is none other than the U.S. which is harassing peace and escalating the tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

The U.S. deliberate act of escalating tensions on the peninsula despite the DPRK's patient efforts for peace is aimed to bar the DPRK, a nuclear weapons state, from achieving economic prosperity. This act is also aimed to justify its bolstering of the armed forces to hold a military edge in the Asia-Pacific region.

It is precisely for this reason that the U.S. has resorted to military provocations, while persistently shunning the DPRK's just demand for ensuring peace and stability on the peninsula through dialogue and negotiations without preconditions. There is a limit to patience.

The DPRK loves peace but never begs for it and it is ready for both dialogue and confrontation.

The DPRK will invariably keep to the road of its own option and surely build a prosperous country on this land, no matter how desperately the hostile forces may try.