Amid mounting tension in the Korean peninsula and economic turmoil, North Korea on Sunday passed a resolution to continue building nuclear arms, describing it as the "nation's life".
The Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea unanimously adopted a resolution to carry out "economic construction and building nuclear armed forces simultaneously and thus bringing earlier the final victory in the cause of building a thriving socialist nation," reported Korean Central News Agency.
The announcement came just a few weeks after the United Nations (UN) ordered new sanctions against North Korea over its nuclear test in February.
"The DPRK's nuclear armed forces represent the nation's life which can never be abandoned as long as the imperialists and nuclear threats exist on earth. They are a treasure of a reunified country which can never be traded with billions of dollars," Korean Central News Agency reported.
"The DPRK's possession of nukes should be fixed by law and the nuclear armed forces should be expanded and beefed up qualitatively and quantitatively until the denuclearization of the world is realized."
Pyongyang also accused the United States of trying to annex the "Korean Peninsula by force and making the Korean people modern slaves".
A war-like situation has developed in the Korean peninsula with North Korea continuing to spell out angry rhetoric against the US and South Korea following their joint military drill and the UN's new sanction on the impoverished country for conducting a nuclear test in February.
North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong-un on Friday put its missile units on standby to attack US military bases in South Korea and the Pacific, after the US sent two nuclear-capable radar-evading B-2 Spirit bombers to Seoul.
Pyongyang had earlier cut a Red Cross hotline and a military hotline, the last channel of communications with South Korea, saying that war could break out any time. It also declared that the 60-year-old Armistice Agreement 1953 that ended the Korean War has been scrapped.
