DPRK warns US to face worse consequences after Washington calls Pyongyang 'threat'

PYONGYANG - The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) warned on Sunday that the United States "will face worse and worse crisis" after US President Joe Biden called the DPRK's nuclear program a "serious threat," reported the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

Kwon Jong Gun, director general of the Department of US Affairs of the Foreign Ministry, said in a statement released by the KCNA that the US president made a slip of the tongue last week about the DPRK in his first Congressional speech in which he called Pyongyang a "serious threat" to the security of the United States and the world.

"His statement clearly reflects his intent to keep enforcing the hostile policy toward the DPRK as it had been done by the US for over half a century," Kwon said.

"The US will face worse and worse crisis beyond control in the near future if it is set to approach the DPRK-US ties, still holding on the outdated policy from Cold War-minded perspective and viewpoint," Kwon warned.

"Now that what the keynote of the US new DPRK policy has become clear, we will be compelled to press for corresponding measures, and with time the US will find itself in a very grave situation," he said.

Kwon also said the US-claimed "diplomacy" is a spurious signboard for covering up its hostile acts, and the "deterrence" touted by it "is just a means for posing nuclear threats" to the DPRK.

In a separate statement issued on Sunday, the DPRK foreign ministry also slammed Washington for criticizing the DPRK's human rights record, saying it amounts to insulting the "dignity of our supreme leadership."

Last week, US State Department Spokesperson Ned Price released a press statement in which he "smeared the statewide anti-epidemic measures in the DPRK" for protecting the life and security of the people from the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic as "human rights abuses" and "even faulted the dignity of our supreme leadership," the DPRK statement said.

As the United States openly expressed its intention to stifle the DPRK with a "resolute deterrence," "denying our ideology and social system and abusing the 'human rights' as a tool for interference in our internal affairs and a political weapon for overturning our social system, we will be forced to take corresponding measures," it added.