The United States should unconditionally replace the Korean Armistice Agreement (AA) with a peace agreement, the Foreign Ministry of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) said Wednesday.

"The U.S. should not just claim that it does not have any hostile intentions to the DPRK in words but prove it in such practical actions as making a bold decision to replace AA with a peace agreement without any excuse or precondition," a ministry spokesman said in a statement.

Noting that "the unstable truce" between the DPRK and the United States has persisted on the Korean Peninsula for 59 years, the statement, carried by the official KCNA news agency, said this is "a very abnormal situation unprecedented in the world history of wars."

Washington "deliberately opted to keep the truce long," and has persistently avoided the conclusion of a peace agreement and kept the state of belligerency on the Korean Peninsula, the statement added, saying "this is the most typical expression of its hostile policy toward the DPRK."

Meanwhile, the United States "has systematically scrapped major provisions of AA, steadily increased military and nuclear threats to the DPRK and in the long run compelled it to have access to nuclear weapons," the spokesman said.

In view of the "stark reality" that countries without nuclear deterrent "were brought down without exception in face of military intervention of hostile forces aimed at toppling social systems," the DPRK "will never abandon nuclear deterrent first as long as the U.S., the biggest nuclear weapons state in the world, remains hostile toward the former," the statement said.

However, it added, the DPRK always stands ready to "settle the problems through dialogue and negotiations, but all the dialogues cannot but be 'ones for the sake of dialogue' unless the U.S. rolls back its hostile policy."

"One way of solving the problem is to sign a peace agreement with the U.S. and another one is to root out the cause of war from the Korean Peninsula for a durable peace," said the statement.

"The ball is in the court of the U.S.," it added.

The Korean War, which broke out in 1950, ceased on July 27, 1953, when the AA was signed in Panmunjom on the border of the DPRK and South Korea. But the war is not officially over because no peace treaty has ever been signed.