The UN Security Council agreed fresh sanctions after the country’s sixth and most powerful nuclear test, after Pyongyang detonated a hydrogen bomb earlier this month.
But the secretive state has now warned it will develop its nuclear programme at an increased rate if the imposed rules do not cease.
The chilling threat came from the hermit nation’s official KCNA news agency on Monday, claiming the UN regulations are aimed at stifling average people’s lives in North Korea.
A foreign ministry spokesman for the North called the sanctions “the most vicious, unethical and inhumane act of hostility to physically exterminate the people of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) let alone its system and government”.
The UN Security Council unanimously passed a US-drafted resolution a week ago mandating tougher new sanctions against Pyongyang that included banning textile imports and capping crude and petrol supply.
It came after North Korea successfully fired a Hwasong-12 intermediate-range ballistic missile over Japan at the beginning of September, in defiance of existing sanctions.
But international tensions were then increased when Pyongyang launched a second ballistic missile across Japan two weeks later.
It comes after North Korea threatened a “nuclear strike” on the US while boasting of being a “world military giant” in the latest war of words between Kim Jong-un’s regime and US President Donald Trump.
Tensions have escalated on the Korean peninsula and the US and South Korea have now launched their own counter operation – conducting a series of bombing drills.
New pictures show a flurry of joint military exercises between Mr Trump’s Guam forces and South Korea, in a show of force against Kim Jong-un.
Four F-35B stealth fighters and two B-1B bombers flew over the peninsula to “demonstrate the deterrence capability of the US-South Korea alliance against North Korea’s nuclear and missile threats”, South Korea’s defence ministry said in a statement.