The KCNA reports that North Korea has promised to keep up what it calls “self-defense efforts”

North Korea said on Saturday that it has no choice but to keep working to improve its self-defense capabilities. It also said that the US and South Korea were putting the Korean Peninsula in a position to start a war.

A Foreign Ministry spokesperson told the state news agency KCNA that the DPRK would step up its efforts to keep the balance of forces in the area and stop the military danger of hostile forces. The spokesperson did not give their name.

The spokesman said that Washington and Seoul were responsible for “different kinds of war plots more than 20 times” this year. This meant that Pyongyang had no choice but to completely stop the threat of a nuclear war.

The strong sister of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un, Kim Yo Jong, spoke out against the UN Secretary-General’s recent criticism of the country’s launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile. She said that testing weapons is for “self-defense.”

North Korea showed off its military power on Thursday by firing off a test of Hwasong-19, a huge new solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile.

North Korea launched an ICBM on Thursday, not long after sending troops to help Russia’s war in Ukraine. This was quickly criticized by Washington, its friends in South Korea, Japan, and Europe, as well as the UN secretary-general.

The North Korean government says the launch went higher than any other North Korean missile. The South Korean and Japanese armies also say they tracked the missile’s flight deep into space before it landed in the ocean between Japan and Russia.

South Korea’s air force said that on Friday, the U.S. and South Korean air forces held their first-ever joint live-fire attack drills. The drills used the Global Hawk and the Reaper drones to drop GPS-guided bombs on enemy targets to practice attacks.