North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has accused the United States of ramping up tension and provocations, saying the Korean peninsula has never faced such risks of nuclear war as now, state media KCNA said on Friday, writes Reuters.

In a speech at a military exhibition in Pyongyang, Kim said his previous experience of negotiations with Washington only highlighted its “aggressive and hostile” policy against Pyongyang, KCNA said: “Never before have the warring parties on the Korean peninsula faced such a dangerous and acute confrontation that it could escalate into the most destructive thermonuclear war. We have already gone as far as we can on negotiating with the US, but what we became certain of from the result is not the superpower’s willingness to coexist, but its thorough stance of power and aggressive and hostile policy toward us that can never change”.

During U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s 1st term, he and Kim held 3 unprecedented meetings in Singapore, Hanoi, and at the Korean border in 2018 and 2019. But their diplomacy failed to achieve any concrete outcome due to differences between U.S. calls for North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons and Kim’s demands for sanctions relief. Trump has long touted his ties with Kim, saying last month that the two countries “would’ve had a nuclear war with millions of people killed” but he stopped it thanks to their relationship.

Kim, in the speech, called for developing and upgrading weaponry into “ultra-modern ones” and vowed to continue advancing defence capabilities to bolster the country’s strategic position, KCNA said.