Kim Jong-un has passed a law allowing pre-emptive nuclear strikes in a move likely to raise tensions in the area.
The North Korean leader said it makes his country's nuclear status “irreversible” and claims it will stop any talk of denuclearisation.
Announcing the new law in front of the Supreme People’s Assembly, the dictator said: "The utmost significance of legislating nuclear weapons policy is to draw an irretrievable line so that there can be no bargaining over our nuclear weapons."
The supreme leader added that he would never surrender the weapons even if his country faced 100 years of sanctions.
The new law allows the government to carry out an automatic counter-strike on an adversary if it attacked the country or staged an attempt on the life of its leader, the state-controlled news agency KCNA reported.
KCNA stated: "In case the command and control system over the state nuclear forces is placed in danger owing to an attack by hostile forces, a nuclear strike shall be launched automatically and immediately to destroy the hostile forces."
The country already had a law that said it could use nuclear weapons to repel invasion or attack from a hostile nuclear state and make retaliatory strikes.
But the new law goes much further and gives permission to carry out preemptive strikes if they detect a possibility of an imminent attack by weapons of mass destruction.
The law also bans any sharing of nuclear arms or technology with other countries.
KCNA reports that the legislature is aimed at reducing the danger of nuclear war by preventing miscalculations among nuclear weapons states and misuse of nuclear weapons.
Ankit Panda of the American-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said: "The basic idea here is to communicate to the United States and South Korea that decapitating the North Korean leadership would not spare them nuclear retaliation."
He added: "I would expect, for the moment, the fail deadly system would rely on organisational steps: for instance, the First Secretary of the Workers’ Party could confirm that Kim Jong Un had been killed in the course of a conflict, thereby authorising the release of nuclear weapons."
