Communist North Korea threatened yesterday to abandon the 1953 Korean War armistice if a naval blockade or other sanctions were imposed because of its suspected nuclear weapons program.
War warnings and assertions that the US was poised to attack the North have been daily fare in Pyongyang's official media since the nuclear crisis flared up late last year.
North Korea demands a non- aggression pact with the US, while Washington wants multilateral talks to press Pyongyang to verifiably halt its suspected atomic program.
It was not clear whether yesterday's statement from the North's Korean People's Army (KPA) was anything more than fresh brinkmanship. North Korea quit most armistice activities in 1994 and has a history of challenging the truce, US officials say.
There was no sign of unusual tension at the Panmunjom truce village which straddles the North-South border. Ten North Korean soldiers escorted a handful of Russian and Chinese tourists on the northern side of the frontier line.
North Korean Foreign Minister Paek Nam-sun held talks with Chinese Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi yesterday on a stopover in Beijing en route to a conference in Malaysia.
"Both sides said the current Korean Peninsula issue should be resolved through peaceful means and dialogue," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue (
Diplomats in Beijing said China had been applying pressure quietly, although it remained opposed to sanctions against the unpredictable North, fearing they could provoke Pyongyang further or even trigger a collapse that would destabilize the region.
South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, who retires next week, said the nuclear crisis had forced him to consider all security threats, but "my conclusion is that I believe the danger of war on the Korean Peninsula is slight -- in fact, non-existent."
Many people in South Korea -- which was invaded by North Korea in 1950 and has lived with the threat of another attack ever since -- simply ignore such outbursts.
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