According to a report in Radio Free Asia, North Korea’s Central Committee of the ruling Workers’ Party has made a startling declaration: the communist country will not give up its nuclear weapons.

The article, published yesterday, citing “local sources”, says the committee declared the weapons a “precious legacy” of the country’s late leaders.

While at present, there is no other articles or reports of a similar nature, we should not be shocked.

As I have stated in these pages and in many others, the chances of the Kim regime ever giving up its nuclear weapons was always slim to none.

From the report:

A source from North Korea’s North Hamgyong province, along the border with China, recently told RFA’s Korean Service that the country’s leadership cabal has no intention of entirely ditching the nuclear program it had taken decades to build.

“In early July, there was a meeting for the core membership of high-ranking party officials from provincial organizations, party secretaries, and managers from business firms … to deliver policy from the Central Committee regarding the current political situation,” said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“The last speaker who ended the six-hour-long meeting emphasized that ‘nuclear is a precious legacy from the late leaders’ and ‘if there is no nuclear, there is death,’” he said.

North Korea began acquiring the basic knowledge necessary to develop a nuclear weapons program in the 1950s, under Kim Jong Un’s grandfather Kim Il Sung—the nation’s founder—and producing plutonium in the late 1980s under his father Kim Jong Il, before testing its first nuclear device in 2006.

According to the source, many of the officials were “taken by surprise by the Central Committee’s decree.”

More from the report:

A second source from North Hamgyong told RFA that the Central Committee’s order had divided North Koreans after news of the meeting filtered out to the public.

“Some agree that ‘without nuclear there will be death’ and some say that it is breaking a promise to the U.S. and the international community,” the source said.

The source said officials are confused about whether the reference to nuclear weapons as “a precious legacy from the late leaders” and the only protection against the obliteration of the country meant that the North could never give them up.

“The high-ranking party officials were listening to the speakers at the meeting because they were trying to determine whether Kim Jong Un really doesn’t intend to give up nuclear weapons or if it was just part of a ploy to gain leverage in [international] negotiations over the denuclearization process,” he said.

“This is the first time since the U.S.-North Korea summit … that the Central Committee officially declared at a high-ranking party officials’ meeting that nuclear is a legacy from the late leaders, but it could simply be an ideological statement aimed at tightening discipline among the ranks.”

You can read the full article here.