SpaceWar.com reports: “North Korea’s status as a nuclear power is ‘final and irreversible’, Pyongyang’s foreign minister said Friday, slamming a G7 call for Kim Jong Un to give up his nukes entirely.

Pyongyang has conducted another record-breaking string of sanctions-defying launches this year, including test-firing the country’s first solid-fuel ballistic missile this month — a key technical breakthrough for Kim’s military.

Seoul, Washington and the United Nations have all criticised the tests, and this week G7 foreign ministers called for the ‘complete, verifiable, and irreversible abandonment of (North Korea’s) nuclear weapons’.

North Korean foreign minister Choe Son Hui slammed the ‘extremely interventionist’ statement, saying the G7 were ‘malignantly pulling up’ her country’s ‘legitimate exercise of its sovereignty’.

‘The position of the DPRK as a world-class nuclear power is final and irreversible,’ Choe said in a statement carried by the official KCNA, referring to North Korea by the initials of its official name…”