Kim Jong-un is said to be furious over reports the US wants to roll out a naval blockade.
And the regime has hit out accusing the Trump administration of being terrified of Kim Jong-un’s nuclear arsenal.
A spokesman for Kim’s regime told state-run media: “The gang of Trump, being terrified by our accomplishment of the great historic cause of completing the state nuclear force, is driving the situation on the Korean peninsula more and more close to the brink of war, acting recklessly without any sense of reason.”
The statement was given to the North’s official mouthpiece the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
It added: “A naval blockade is an act of wanton violation of the sovereignty and dignity of an independent state and an act of war of aggression which cannot be tolerated.”
But US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson fired back that it was important that there was a “right to interdict maritime traffic transporting goods” after the North’s latest ballistic nuclear missile test on November 29.
Mr Tillerson is set to chair a meeting of the UN Security council tomorrow in New York to discuss the North’s nuclear ambitions.
Yet a North Korea government spokesman told KCNA: “The meeting is none other than a desperate measure plotted by the US being terrified by the incredible might of our Republic that has successfully achieved the great historic cause of completing the state nuclear force, the cause of building a rocket power, through the great November event.”
The US Secretary of State has exhausted diplomatic solutions to reign in the North’s aggressive rhetoric and actions.
And the US State Department said yesterday its policy on North Korea “has not changed,” following remarks by Mr Tillerson that Washington was ready to talk without prior conditions.
Mr Tillerson stated the need for a “period of calm” in Pyongyang’s nuclear and ballistic tests before negotiations could begin.
However, he also said talks could begin “without preconditions,” including without confirmation that Kim Jong-Un’s regime will abandon its nuclear program.
Mr Tillerson had said in August that “a condition of those talks is there is no future where North Korea holds nuclear weapons.”
His comments, made on Tuesday, were intepreted by some experts as a softening of the US position.
But State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said: “The secretary was not creating a new policy, our policy remains exactly the same as it was.”
Donald Trump’s national security advisor, H.R. McMaster, said that denuclearization is “the only viable objective in North Korea.”
He said: “Talks with North Korea won’t be an end in themselves.”