North Korea on Thursday slammed the entry of a U.S. Navy nuclear-powered attack submarine to South Korea as a "direct threat" to its security and vowed to bolster its "nuclear deterrence for self-defense."
The country's Foreign Ministry, in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency, called the deployment of the USS Mississippi, which is one of the most advanced nuclear submarines in the U.S. Pacific Fleet, "a direct threat to the security of the DPRK and peace of the region."
The DPRK is an acronym for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, North Korea's official name.
"The U.S. ceaseless introduction of strategic assets of various kinds to and around the Korean Peninsula is rendering the already unstable situation all the more uncontrollable," the ministry said.
It said North Korea needs to bolster its "nuclear deterrence for self-defense" in every way it can in the face of the "U.S. ceaseless provocations for a new war."
"The line of the Workers' Party of Korea on simultaneously pushing forward economic construction and the building of nuclear force is the most just line for fundamentally removing the danger of a nuclear war created by the U.S. and ensuring peace and security in the region and the rest of the world by dint of the powerful nuclear deterrence," it said.
The 7,800-ton, Virginia-class Mississippi, which is equipped with both torpedoes and Tomahawk cruise missiles, entered the South Korean port of Pusan on Monday
The Pearl Harbor-based fast-attack submarine, commissioned in 2012, was shifted from the Atlantic in November 2014 as part of the Obama administration's rebalance to the Pacific.