North Korean officers shield themselves from the rain after the parade celebrating the 70th anniversary of the founding of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea, in Pyongyang on Friday.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un declared Saturday that his country was ready to stand up to any threat posed by the US as he spoke at a lavish military parade to mark the 70th anniversary of the North’s ruling party and trumpet his third-generation leadership.

The parade, which featured thousands of goose-stepping soldiers and military hardware including missiles and drones mounted on trucks, kicked off what is expected to be one of the North’s biggest celebrations ever — an attention-getting event that is the government’s way of showing the world and its own people that the Kim dynasty is firmly in control and its military a power to be reckoned with.

Kim walked down a red carpet and saluted his honor guard before walking up to a podium to deliver a speech laced with the fiery rhetoric that is commonly used by the communist regime.

“Our revolutionary force is ready to respond to any kind of war the American imperialists want,” said Kim, flanked by visiting Chinese official Liu Yunshan and senior North Korean officials.

“Through the line of Songun (military-first) politics, our Korean People’s Army has become the strongest revolutionary force and our country has become an impenetrable fortress and a global military power,” he said, interrupted by applause several times.

Kim didn’t specifically comment on North Korea’s nuclear or long-range missile capabilities and also didn’t have anything to say about relations with rival South Korea. He spent most of his speech arguing that the party has been successfully improving the lives of the North Korean people in face of external threats since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War and declared it will continue to do so.

In a military parade that followed, tanks, armored vehicles, rocket launchers and a variety of missiles mounted on trucks rolled by, while military planes flew in formation above the square, forming the symbol of the Workers’ Party of Korea — a hammer, brush and sickle. Another group of planes formed the number 70 in the sky.

An expert at the Korea Institute for Defense Analysis, a security think tank in Seoul, Jin Moo Kim, said North Korea revealed a new 300-millimeter rocket launcher.

It also displayed drones and a KN-08 ballistic missile, with an estimated range of 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) that the country had previously shown off in 2012. Kim said the presence of Liu might have prevented the North from revealing its most provocative weapons. Thousands of civilian marchers followed, holding colored cards to spell out Kim’s name, and he responded by waving to the crowd and holding the hand of Liu, the visiting Chinese official.