North Korea, facing international censure for this week’s nuclear test, yesterday threatened to attack South Korea after it joined a US-led plan to check vessels suspected of carrying equipment for weapons of mass destruction.
Adding to mounting tension in the region, South Korean media reported that Pyongyang had restarted a plant that makes plutonium that can be used in nuclear bombs.
In Moscow, news agencies quoted an official as saying that Russia was taking precautionary security measures because it feared tensions over the test could lead to nuclear war.
The UN Security Council is discussing ways to punish Pyongyang for Monday’s test, widely denounced as a major threat to regional stability and which brings the reclusive North closer to having a reliable nuclear bomb.
North Korea’s latest threat came after Seoul announced, following the nuclear test, that it was joining the US-led Proliferation Security Initiative, launched under the administration of former US president George W. Bush as a part of its “war on terror.”
“Any hostile act against our peaceful vessels including search and seizure will be considered an unpardonable infringement on our sovereignty and we will immediately respond with a powerful military strike,” a North Korean army spokesman was quoted as saying by the official KCNA news agency.
He reiterated that North Korea was no longer bound by an armistice signed at the end of the 1950-1953 Korean War because Washington had ignored its responsibility as a signatory by drawing Seoul into the anti-proliferation effort.
South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev agreed in a phone call that a strong international response was needed, including UN action, Lee’s office said.
North Korea appears to have made good on a threat issued in April of restarting a facility at its Yongbyon nuclear plant that extracts plutonium, South Korea’s largest newspaper, Chosun Ilbo, reported.
“There are various indications that reprocessing facilities in Yongbyon resumed operation [and] have been detected by US surveillance satellite, and these include steam coming out of the facility,” the Chosun Ilbo quoted an unnamed government source as saying.
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