A nuclear war with the US is an established fact and the only question is when it will break out, a North Korean spokesman said last night.

In response to a huge US military exercise over South Korea, the rogue state said: ‘We will make the US dearly pay the consequences with our mighty nuclear force.’

North Korea also claimed that ‘bellicose remarks’ from high-ranking US officials, including CIA Director Mike Pompeo, make war inevitable.

Pompeo said Saturday that US intelligence agencies believe North Korean leader Kim Jong Un doesn’t understand how tenuous his situation is domestically and internationally.

The North’s spokesman said Pompeo provoked the country by ‘impudently criticizing our supreme leadership which is the heart of our people.’

The comments were published by the official Korean Central News Agency late Wednesday, hours after the United States flew a B-1B supersonic bomber over South Korea as part of a massive combined aerial exercise involving hundreds of warplanes.

The unnamed Foreign Ministry spokesman said: ‘The large-scale nuclear war exercises conducted by the US in succession are creating touch-and-go situation on the Korean peninsula and series of violent war remarks coming from the U.S. high-level politicians amid such circumstances have made an outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula an established fact. The remaining question now is: when will the war break out.

‘We do not wish for a war but shall not hide from it, and should the US miscalculate our patience and light the fuse for a nuclear war, we will surely make the U.S. dearly pay the consequences with our mighty nuclear force which we have consistently strengthened.’