North Korea's state media pointed at the sale of weapons by the United States to South Korea to justify its own military buildup, claiming such sales are instigating a new arms race.

In a commentary piece, the North’s Korean Central News Agency said the U.S. was working harder than ever to sell advanced weapon systems, pointing to the sale of F-35 stealth fighters, SM-6 sea-to-air missiles and AIM-9X air-to-air missiles to South Korea.

The piece accused Washington of trying to seize military hegemony over the region and the world by arming their so-called puppets in Seoul with "modern murder equipment"  to turn them into storm troops to carry out its bidding against Pyongyang and the wider Indo-Pacific region.

It claimed that the weapons sold to South Korea are attack systems with ranges that extend far beyond the Korean Peninsula and that the U.S. seeks to edge out their competitors in and around the region by sparking another arms race.

The piece said that North Korea would respond to U.S. sales of advanced weaponry to South Korea by accelerating the modernization of its own military "one-hundredfold and one-thousandfold."

It also warned that even the tiniest spark on the Korean Peninsula could turn into a global thermonuclear war.