N.KOREA: "THE U.S IS NOTHING BUT A CORPSE GOING TO THE GRAVE"

North Korea blasted President Donald Trump's recent "America First" National Security Strategy, insisting supreme leader Kim Jong Un would keep his nuclear weapons and refuse to bow to U.S. pressure.

North Korea's Foreign Ministry issued Friday the scathing condemnation of Trump's debut strategy, saying it was only the latest of a number of U.S. failures to engage the reclusive, communist state that has amassed a powerful nuclear and ballistic weapons arsenal in defiance of U.N. sanctions. The ministry said that, despite engaging in multilateral talks with the U.S. and other countries for two decades, "the previous U.S. administrations threw all the agreements reached with us into a garbage can like waste paper," assuming the country would collapse. Despite Trump's vow to take a tougher stance than his predecessors, the ministry said, "There is no change at all in the strategic goal of the U.S. to achieve hegemony over the world by means of force."

"We chose the road of possessing the nuclear weapons to defend our sovereignty and rights to existence and development in the face of ever increased hostile moves and nuclear threats and blackmail of the U.S. We are convinced that the only way to ensuring a lasting peace on the Korean peninsula is to have the deterrence that ensures a practical balance of force with the U.S.," the ministry wrote, according to the official Korean Central News Agency.

"The international society should keep vigilance against the maneuvers of the gang of Trump to invade and control the DPRK with force by igniting a nuclear war at any cost in the Korean peninsula and clearly see through the ulterior motive behind its repeated talk of dialogue, designed to cover up its evil intention and mock the world," it added, using an acronym for the country's official name—the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

"The gang of Trump likes to pose itself as if its country is a world superpower. However, the U.S. is nothing but a corpse going to the grave."

The U.S. and North Korea's history began in the aftermath of World War II when the Korean Peninsula was seized from the Japanese Empire and divided between the Soviet Union and the U.S. Tensions grew between the two satellite states and, in 1950, a bloody, three-year war broke out between the Soviet-backed North, with heavy Chinese support, and the South, supported by the U.S. and U.N. While an armistice was reached in 1953, with little territorial change, the two rivals technically remain at war today.

Since then, there have been no formal relations between Washington and Pyongyang, which found itself firmly on the communist side of the Cold War. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, however, then-President Bill Clinton demanded North Korea allow entry to inspectors of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency, who were refused in 1994, a violation of the deal that halted the Korean War. While carefully balancing escalation and diplomacy, Clinton managed to form the Agreed Framework between the pair, giving heavy oil and light-water reactors to North Korea in exchange for a nuclear freeze, and the Four Party Talks involving China and South Korea in 1996.

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