Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, rejected international calls for Pyongyang to denuclearize Thursday, saying the country’s status as a nuclear weapons state was “absolute” and could not be reversed.

In a statement carried by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), Kim dismissed criticism raised at the 70th General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna that North Korea was violating U.N. Security Council resolutions, adding that calls for complete and irreversible denuclearization were “familiar silly talk.”

“They are all noises, not surprising and not new, that we [sic] can