North Korea claimed Thursday that it has the full capacity to counter the U.S.' new military strategy, warning that Washington will face dire consequences if it raises tension on the divided peninsula.

A spokesman at the Institute for American Studies of the North's foreign ministry condemned Washington's "Third Offset Strategy," which aims to maintain the U.S. military's superiority over growing threats by building up the country's precision weapons capabilities and adopting new operational concepts for conflict.

The unidentified spokesman rebuked former U.S. officials and experts' latest claim that the Third Offset Strategy should be applied to the Korean Peninsula, warning that Pyongyang is "fully" capable of countering it.

 "(The claim) is a manifestation of the extreme hostile moves of the U.S. to stifle the DPRK by mobilizing not only conventional and nuclear forces but also ultra-modern war hardware," he was as quoted as saying by the Korean Central News Agency.

The DPRK stands for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the North's official name.

"The DPRK is fully capable of making any strategy of the U.S. go belly-up determinedly, to say nothing of the third offset strategy," it said.

North Korea's warning came as Pyongyang claimed the successful launch of an intermediate ballistic missile in June, saying that it now has the means to strike U.S. forces in the western Pacific region.

The North has insisted that its development of nuclear weapons is a powerful deterrent against what it called Washington's hostile policy toward the communist country.

The two Koreas still remains technically at war, since the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a ceasefire, not a peace treaty. About 28,500 U.S. soldiers are stationed in South Korea as a legacy of the three-year war. (Yonhap)