North Korea thumbed its nose at diplomatic efforts to resolve the nuclear crisis yesterday by threatening to restart missile tests a day after pulling out of a key atomic treaty.
Pyongyang's ambassador to China said the moratorium on missile tests was defunct now that the US had invalidated all agreements between the two countries, while its envoys in Austria said a controversial nuclear reactor would be running in a matter of weeks.
PHOTO: AP
"That moratorium about missile test fire will be no exception now that the United States has made invalid all the agreements reached between the US and DPRK (North Korea)," ambassador Choe Kim-su told reporters at a news conference in Beijing, traditionally Pyongyang's closest ally.
Asked to clarify what Choe meant, an embassy official said his remarks meant "we might fire [missiles] and the moratorium [on the firing of missiles] is finished."
In a historic summit with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in September, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il pledged to extend a moratorium on missile tests beyond its original expiry date this year.
The hardline communist state fired a suspected missile over Japan's main island of Honshu and into the Pacific in 1998, sending shockwaves around the region.
North Korean diplomats in Vienna also said that the controversial Yongbyon nuclear reactor would be running in a matter of weeks but insisted the move was the result of a US decision to stop fuel shipments.
"You have to understand that we are in winter. We badly need energy because the US stopped the deliveries of heavy fuel," said ambassador Kim Gwang-sop.
Son Mun-san, another envoy at the embassy in Vienna -- home to the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) -- said the Yongbyon facility would start producing electricity in a few weeks.
The IAEA had been monitoring Yongbyon for eight years when North Korea decided during the current crisis to expel its monitors and turn off surveillance equipment.
The Stalinist state has also reportedly unsealed thousands of spent fuel rods in a cooling pond at Yongbyon from which plutonium for making nuclear warheads could be extracted within months.
The IAEA has insisted the reprocessing facility at Yongbyon is "irrelevant" to North Korea's electricity needs.
North Korea had already triggered global outrage over its withdrawal Friday from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT). Its latest moves were set to raise tensions a further notch.
Washington said in October that Pyongyang had admitted running a secret enriched uranium nuclear weapons program in violation of a 1994 agreement, a charge North Korea has consistently denied.
The US subsequently declared the 1994 agreement "nullified" and halted fuel shipments, prompting North Korea to reactivate the Yonbyon complex and subsequently withdraw from the NPT.
More than one million people packed into central Pyongyang Saturday to hear speeches by political leaders in defense of the NPT withdrawal and pledge a fight to the death against attempts to infringe their sovereignty, the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.
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