Announcing that because "the U.S. is set to light a fuse for a nuclear war, the revolutionary armed forces of the DPRK will exercise the right to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to destroy the strongholds of the aggressors and to defend the supreme interests of the country,” the North Korean government threatened to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike for the first time on Thursday.

This is just the latest in a series of belligerent announcements that the North Korean government has released this week. Earlier in the week, a four-star general in that country stated that on Monday of next week, North Korea would end the 1953 armistace that ended the three-year-long war carried out on the Korean peninsula in the early fifties.

These announcements by the North Korean government have come out in connection with both the U.S./South Korean military games scheduled this month as well as fresh sanctions that have been hammered out and were voted on by the U.N. Security Council on Thursday as a result of North Korea’s continued disregard for bans on missile and nuclear testing.

Without elaborating on what countermeasures they would carry out, North Korea responded to the newest sanctions imposed by the Security Council saying that the sanctions “will compel the DPRK to take at an earlier date more powerful second and third countermeasures as it had declared,” announced a spokeman for that country.

Some analysts surmise that much of the threatening language coming out of the DPRK is to test the resolve of South Korean’s newly elected president Park Geunhye, the south’s first female leader in that post as well as the harsher sanctions put in place today.

China, who signed the 1953 armistace as an ally of North Korea, that ended the hostilities on the peninsula, voted in favor of this newest round of sanctions. The vote at the Security Council was unanimous.