- North Korea warned the Korean peninsula would be reduced
to a "land of ashes" in a nuclear war with the United States
unless Washington calls off plans to boost forces in the region.
-
- Pyongyang was responding to the Pentagon's decision to
order two dozen long-range bombers to prepare to deploy to Guam in the
Pacific, a check against North Korea while the US masses forces in the
Gulf for a possible war against Iraq.
-
- "If the US moves to bolster aggression troops are
unchecked, the whole land of Korea will be reduced to ashes and the Koreans
will not escape horrible nuclear disasters," the official Korean Central
News Agency (KCNA) said Friday.
-
- "All the Koreans in the North, the South and abroad
should turn out as one in the struggle to check and frustrate the US arms
buildup, clearly mindful that the more aggression troops the US imperialists
deploy in South Korea, the greater misfortune and pain the Korean nation
will suffer," KCNA said, citing North Korea's Committee for the Peaceful
Reunification.
-
- KCNA stressed direct talks alone would resolve the four-month-old
standoff stemming from US revelations in October that Pyongyang had admitted
to running a nuclear program in violation of a 1994 accord.
-
- US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in Rome on
Friday that North Korea's nuclear moves should prompt a reappraisal of
existing international agreements designed to prevent the spread of weapons
of mass destruction.
-
- North Korea showed that "many of the non-proliferation
efforts that the world community has engaged in, and which have had a degree
of success over a period of time, may be in need of review and attention,"
he said.
-
- He said international pacts did not seem to be working
and that "we might be on the cusp of an acceleration of the number
of nuclear states."
-
- North Korea announced January 10 it was withdrawing from
the international Non-Prolieration Treaty following a confrontation with
Washington over its suspected nuclear program.
-
- Pyongyang ratcheted up the presure on Wednesday when
it said it had fired up a reactor at the centre of the nuclear crisis,
a step Washington and Seoul said would be serious if confirmed.
-
- A senior regime official also said North Korea was prepared
to launch a pre-emptive strike against US forces, a threat shrugged off
by both Washington and Seoul.
-
- "We've heard much talk from North Korea before.
Obviously the United States is very prepared, with robust plans, for any
contingencies," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said on Thursday.
-
- US President George W. Bush still "believes that
diplomacy is the way to handle the situation" in consultation with
China, Russia, South Korea and Japan, he said.
-
- Bush says he is ready to talk to Pyongyang -- but only
about how it can dismantle the twin nuclear programs which sparked the
crisis last year.
-
- Pyongyang accuses Washington of seeking to internationalize
the issue and is opposed to the crisis being referred to the United Nations,
a step that could come next week when the International Atomic Energy Agency
meets to discuss the crisis in Vienna.
-
- The South Korea stock market tumbled for third day in
a row Friday, partly on North Korean security fears, with the composite
index down 2.04 percent, experts said.
-
- But there was no panic in Seoul because many South Koreans
no longer view North Korea as a major security threat, according to professor
Koh Yu-Hwan, a North Korea expert at Seoul's Dong Guk University.
-
- Indeed some officials in Seoul have expressed more concern
about Washington's failure to engage in dialogue than about the potential
danger posed by Pyongyang.
-
- South Koreans also worry that Washington could launch
a pre-emptive strike to take out North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear complex,
a step considered by former president Bill Clinton during the 1994 crisis.
-
- "North Korea will not strike first, but if the US
attacks the retaliation will be massive and Seoul will not escape,"
said Yoon Young-O, a political science professor at Kookmin University
here.
-
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