South Korea’s defense ministry has criticized a statement from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s sister over the recent arrival of a U.S. aircraft carrier in South Korea. 

The ministry said Tuesday that North Korea’s criticism of the deployment of a U.S. strategic asset to implement the U.S. extended deterrence pledge and combined South Korea-U.S. exercise ahead of the Freedom Shield exercise is merely sophistry to justify the North’s nuclear and missile programs and to excuse its provocations.

The ministry said North Korea’s nuclear weapons are never acceptable, and that the only way for the North to survive is to abandon its obsession with and delusions about nuclear weapons. 

The ministry then warned that if North Korea uses the legitimate and defensive military activities of South Korea and the United States as an excuse to provoke them, it will be met with “overwhelming retaliation.”

The statement comes after Kim Yo-jong slammed the U.S. for sending its aircraft carrier the USS Carl Vinson to Busan, South Korea’s southern port city, denouncing it as a provocation and an expression of its hostile intentions toward the North.