Nuke accord a 'dead document'

2003-05-13 09:27

Seoul - North Korea on Tuesday called a decade-old agreement with South Korea to keep the Korean peninsula nuclear weapons-free a "dead document" and blamed the United States for the demise of the accord.

In a statement denouncing Washington on the eve of a White House summit between US President George W Bush and South Korean counterpart Roh Moo-Hyun, the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said the 1992 North-South pact had been nullified despite Pyongyang's own "positive efforts" to implement it.

"Ever since the publication of the North-South joint declaration on the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula the US adopted it as its policy to systematically and completely ditch it and has stood in the way of its realization in every way," KCNA said in a lengthy statement.

The agreement was the last legal international restraint on North Korean nuclear ambitions after the Stalinist regime pulled out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and abandoned a 1994 arms control accord with the United States.

"The Bush administration has systematically and completely torpedoed the process of denuclearisation on the Korean peninsula," KCNA said. "The inter-Korean declaration on denuclearization of the Korean peninsula was thus reduced to a dead document..."

South Korean President Roh, visiting the United States on his first foreign trip since taking office in February, meets with Bush at the White House on Wednesday.

North Korea said last month in talks with the United States in Beijing that it had nuclear weapons and was reprocessing thousands of spent fuel rods that could provide plutonium for several more within months.

KCNA said the lesson North Korea had learned from the US-led war in Iraq was to arm itself with a "deterrent force" capable of repelling any attack.

North Korea frequently accuses the United States of planning a preemptive strike. Pyongyang warned that it would meet force with force.

"The DPRK (North Korea) will increase its self-defensive capacity strong enough to destroy aggressors at a single stroke," KCNA said.

"Any US aerial attack will be decisively countered with aerial attack and its land strategy will be coped with land strategy."

- AFX