People sit near a television screen showing a news broadcast with file footage of a North Korean missile test, at a train station in Seoul on September 12, 2026. (AFP Photo)
The powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said on Sept. 17 that the country’s nuclear-armed status was “absolute,” calling those hoping for its denuclearization “idiots.”
North Korea has legally enshrined its status as a nuclear weapons state, with its leadership declaring the country’s atomic arsenal permanent and irreversible.
U.S. President Donald Trump said in August that Pyongyang possesses 57 “very powerful” nuclear weapons, with Seoul putting the figure at between 80 and 120.
“The DPRK’s position as a nuclear weapons state is absolute which cannot reverse with anything,” Kim’s sister, Kim Yo Jong, said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal “makes a significant contribution to deterring the outrageous acts of international rogues,” she said.
Kim’s statement came during the General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, where she said the “familiar silly talk” of efforts to denuclearize the North was expected.
“If they believe that it is really possible, they will only hear the word of idiots,” she said.
“No matter how rhetorically the hostile forces may deny, the reality in which the nuclear position of the DPRK has been permanently settled physically and legally cannot change even a bit,” she added, using the acronym for North Korea’s full name.
