SEOUL—State-run media KCNA reported that North Korea accused the United States and South Korea on Thursday of inciting nuclear war through their joint military exercises and threatened to take "offensive action," in retaliation.

Choe Ju Hyon, whom KCNA identified as an international security analyst, published a commentary in which she criticized the exercises for being "a trigger for driving the situation on the Korean Peninsula to the point of explosion."

According to the article, "The reckless military confrontational hysteria of the U.S. and its followers against the DPRK is driving the situation on the Korean peninsula to an irreversible catastrophe ... to the brink of a nuclear war,"

The official name of North Korea, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, was abbreviated there.

The document continued, "Now the international community unanimously hopes that the dark clouds of nuclear war hanging over the Korean peninsula will be dispelled as soon as possible."

Since March, U.S. and South Korean forces have been engaging in a number of annual springtime exercises, including their first significant amphibious landing drills in five years, air and sea drills involving a U.S. aircraft carrier and B-1B and B-52 bombers, and land and sea exercises involving a B-52 bomber.

The commentary singled out the airline's involvement as intended to escalate tensions, claiming Pyongyang will react to the drills by practising its war deterrence through "offensive action"

As a result of the drills, the Korean Peninsula has become a massive powder magazine that can explode at any time.

North Korea has reacted angrily to the exercises and described them as a drill for an invasion.

It has recently increased its military activity by revealing new, smaller nuclear warheads, launching an intercontinental ballistic missile that can strike anywhere in the United States, and testing what it calls an underwater attack drone with a nuclear warhead.

Han Tae Song, the permanent representative of North Korea's diplomatic mission in Geneva, strongly denounced a yearly resolution the U.N. Human Rights Council adopted this week on the state of the nation's human rights in a separate KCNA dispatch.

For a long time, Pyongyang has dismissed international criticism of its violations of human rights as an American-led plot to topple its government.

Han referred to the resolution as an "intolerable act of political provocation and hostility" and "the most heavily politicized document of fraud."