The DPRK is not interested in aggravating the situation as it is channeling all its efforts into the building of an economic power and feels no need to provoke anyone, the statement said, and went on:.

As the first chairman of the National Defence Commission of the DPRK clarified in his New Year Address, its primary task for this year is to develop economy and improve the people's standard of living and to this end it requires stable situation and peaceful climate more than any time.

As the U.S. hostile acts against the DPRK have become "routine," the latter has also become routine in its work to implement the line of simultaneously developing the two fronts for self-defence to cope with them.

Now the U.S. should be accustomed to the status of the DPRK as a nuclear weapons state whether it likes or not.

As the DPRK had already clarified, it will bolster in every way the capabilities for nuclear attack and retaliation to cope with the U.S. ceaseless acts of infringing upon former's sovereignty and perpetrating threatening provocations, but it will not deliberately use nuclear weapons.

Still valid are all proposals for preserving peace and stability on the peninsula and in Northeast Asia including the ones for ceasing our nuclear test and the conclusion of a peace treaty in return for U.S. halt to joint military exercises.

It is preposterous for the U.S. to talk about "provocations" from the DPRK though it is persistently sidestepping the latter's fair and aboveboard proposals and escalating the tension.

It is the U.S. and the south Korean puppet forces that are making provocations, rendering the situation extremely tense.

The south Korean puppet forces' resumption of psychological warfare broadcasting is a sheer provocation nothing relevant to the normal process pursuant to the DPRK's line of simultaneously developing the two fronts.

The U.S. is working hard to bring the dark clouds of a nuclear war by introducing the strategic nuclear strike means into south Korea. The UN, too, is making great haste to fabricate a resolution on sanctions aimed at such hostile acts as hamstringing our efforts for peaceful economic construction and the improvement of the people's standard of living.

Such provocative and hostile acts against the DPRK will not be confined to escalating the tension on the peninsula but inevitably lead to a war.

Once a powder keg catches fire and goes off, the responsibility for it will rest with those who ignited the fuse.