North Korea abandons truce and threatens to attack the South
North Korea has declared it is abandoning the truce that ended the Korean war and warned that it could launch a military attack against the South.
Pyongyang said that South Korea's decision to start intercepting ships that are suspected of carrying weapons of mass destruction was tantamount to "a declaration of war against us".
The statement follows a number of missile tests and an underground nuclear test by the North in the last two days.
The statement, through North Korea's state newswire, warned Seoul that North Korea "will no longer be bound by the armistice accord" and that the "Korean peninsula will go back to a state of war".
Pyongyang had previously warned Seoul that joining the US-led Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) would have fearful consequences.
No formal peace treaty has ever been signed between the two countries, but an armistice in 1953 and a Mutual Defence treaty between the US and South Korea effectively ended the Korean war.
In October 2007, Kim Jong-il and Roh Moo-hyun, the former president of South Korea who committed suicide last weekend, signed a pact declaring "permanent peace" between the two sides.
The North Korean statement added that its troops will take "corresponding military action", without giving any details. "Those who have provoked us will face unimaginable merciless punishment". A possible first target may be five South Korean islands near the border between the two countries in the Yellow Sea, after Pyongyang refused to "guarantee the legal status" of the territories.
The PSI is largely symbolic, and does not permit South Korean forces to search ships or ground planes outside of its sovereign territory. President Lee Myung-bak had dithered over whether to join the project for over a month, but took the plunge on Tuesday after North Korea detonated a nuclear bomb in an undergound bunker on its north eastern coast.
Residents in North Korea's capital were reported by the state media to have held a mass rally on Wednesday at the Pyongyang Indoor Stadium to celebrate the country's second nuclear test, perhaps confirming that the purpose of the bomb test was to shore up domestic support for Kim Jong-il's leadership.
Choe Thae-Bok, a senior official of North Korea's Communist party, said military threats and economic sanctions had prompted the North to conduct the second test. "It was a grand undertaking to protect the supreme interests of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea," he said, accusing the US of planning a "preemptive nuclear attack and sanctions and pressure" on North Korea.
Meanwhile, North Korea has launched a further missile, bringing the total number of short-range missiles fired in the past three days to six.
A South Korean official told Yonhap, the news agency, that a night-time missile launch had been carried out on Tuesday and that there are signs of imminent further launches along the rogue state's West coast. The North has warned that it may continue to launch missiles until Saturday.
"The North appears to have launched a ground-to-ship missile into the East Sea shortly after 9pm Tuesday," said the unnamed Defence official. Pyongyang had already launched two missiles from its east coast earlier on Tuesday, after firing three on Monday.
It is unclear whether the missiles are test-launches, or whether North Korea is seeking to dissuade South Korean and US spy planes from hovering over its military installations in order to verify its claim of a nuclear test.
According to the Chosun Ilbo newspaper, spy planes have detected steam coming from the nuclear reprocessing facility at North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear plant, suggesting that North Korea has once again begun to extract plutonium for its weapons programme.
The North has already warned that it intended to being turning its spent nuclear fuel rods into plutonium in protest at the international criticism of its rocket test on April 5. Yongbyon is thought to be capable of processing 200 to 250 tons of spent fuel each year and harvesting around 100kg of plutonium. In the past, the US has warned that reprocessing fuel is an action that could lead to a military strike on the country.
Pyongyang triggered global condemnation on Monday after detonating a nuclear bomb in a bunker six-miles underground, in the country's north east. Experts are now scaling down their estimates of the size of the nuclear device, and a precise analysis will take days or weeks. However a senior White House official said yesterday the explosion was "several kilotons", a major advance on the North's test in 2006.
The United Nations Security Council met on Tuesday to begin work on a response to North Korea's actions, and Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the UN said a new resolution "will indeed take some time". Mrs Rice said the US wanted "a strong resolution with teeth. Those teeth could take various different forms. They are economic levers, they are other levers that we might pursue."
The Security Council is expected to produce its plan in the next fortnight, although it is likely to face opposition from China on any major sanctions, especially since only China has any major economic ties with the pariah state.
The Chinese government said that it was "resolutely opposed" to the nuclear test, but weakened the tone of its statement from the strong words it issued in response to North Korea's first nuclear test in October 2006. It also called for a "calm response" to the crisis and expressed hope that the issue would be resolved through dialogue. China is North Korea's biggest source of food and fuel, but receives access to North Korean minerals in return.
With tensions on the Korean peninsula high, South Korea said it would join a US-led initiative to intercept ships suspected of carrying weapons of mass destruction, a move that Pyongyang has previously warned it would consider "an act of war".
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