"The US has nuclear weapons off our coast, targeting our country, our capital and our Dear Leader, Kim Jong Un. We will not step back as long as there's a nuclear threat to us from the United States," Lee Yong Pil, director of the Foreign Ministry's Institute for American Studies said in an interview with NBC News. "A preemptive nuclear strike is not something the U.S. has a monopoly on. If we see that the U.S. would do it to us, we would do it first."
He added that North Korea could conduct "a sixth, a seventh or an eighth" nuclear test. Such policy is prompted by "the increasingly aggressive" joint drills carried out by Washington and Seoul in the Korean peninsula, the top official continued.
Lee Yong Pil warned that neither sanctions by the United Nations nor pressure coming from the international community along with Washington would prevent Pyongyang from building its nuclear capacity.
"We have to have nuclear weapons to protect our country, and it's our policy to go nuclear," he added.
North Korea has been under pressure from the international community since a nuclear test and the launch of a long-range rocket early this year.
