North Korea nuclear weapons status ‘irreversible,’ state says, as US

(LONDON) — North Korean officials on Monday said the country’s status as nuclear state “has become irreversible,” despite efforts by the West to negotiate an end to the production of those weapons, according to state media.

“The position of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as a nuclear weapons state which has been permanently specified in the supreme and basic law of the state has become irreversible,” North Korea’s Permanent Mission to the U.N. said in a press statement, according to the Korean Central News Agency.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, the intergovernmental body for nuclear cooperation, has no “legal right and moral justification” to interfere with what North Korea consider an “internal affair,” the mission’s press statement said.

The statement on Monday was