North Korean Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui on Friday denounced the Group of Seven (G-7) for “interfering in internal affairs and refusing to recognize the country as a nuclear weapons state,” the official media reported. “G-7 has neither authority nor qualification to say this or that about the DPRK’s exercise of its sovereignty and its national status,” Choe said in a statement carried by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). “The position of the DPRK as a world-class nuclear power is final and irreversible” and “will remain as an undeniable and stark reality,” she said. DPRK stands for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, North Korea’s official name. Choe issued the statement following the G-7 Foreign Ministers’ joint communique earlier this week, which condemned the North’s recent ballistic missile tests and said North Korea “cannot and will never” have the status of a nuclear weapons state under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The G-7 consists of Britain, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Japan and the US. She also stressed that the North’s position as a nuclear weapons state is not a thing “granted or recognized by anyone” but was “established along with the existence of the actual nuclear deterrence and fixed by the law” on the state nuclear force policy. In addition, the minister warned that her country will take “strong counteraction” if G-7 countries show any move to “infringe” on the North’s sovereignty and fundamental interests. “The position of the DPRK as a nuclear weapons state will remain as an undeniable and stark reality — no matter that the US and the West would not recognize it for a hundred or a thousand years,” said Choe, The message served as a reminder that leader Kim Jong Un may try to force his way on to the agenda when G7 leaders hold their annual summit next month in Japan. His regime has ratcheted up tensions to levels unseen in years with tests of new weapons to deliver nuclear strikes, including a solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missiles launched for the first time this month that could be quickly deployed to carry a warhead to the US mainland. North Korea’s ability to deliver a nuclear strike has grown to the point that some policy experts have made calls to declare the country a nuclear weapons state. The change would lead to a revamp of a decades-old US policy aimed at preventing that from happening, while seeking the complete, verifiable and irreversible end of its atomic arsenal. There’s no sign the Biden administration would make such a declaration. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who is hosting the G7 meeting in his hometown of Hiroshima, has long campaigned for an end to nuclear arms and protested North Korea’s blistering pace of ballistic missile launches in defiance of United Nations Security Council resolutions that bar Pyongyang from the tests. — Agencies