Seoul: On Wednesday North Korea vowed to take "every necessary measure" to protect itself as it reiterated charges that an ongoing US-South Korean military exercise could trigger a war.
The communist state says the March 9-20 exercise, which involves tens of thousands of troops, is aimed at launching a "second Korean War" while Seoul and Washington insist it is a routine annual defensive drill.
Pyongyang has already this week placed its 1.2 million-member military on combat alert, cut military phone and fax lines to South Korea, and warned that any attempt to block what it says is an upcoming satellite launch would also spark a war.
North Korea foreign ministry said "This situation hardens the will of the DPRK (North Korea) to bolster up its defence capability in every way, no matter what others may say."
The official Korean Central News Agency spokesman told "The DPRK, exposed to the potential threat of the US and its allied forces, will take every necessary measure to protect its sovereignty."
The North described the drill as "nuclear war exercises designed to mount a pre-emptive attack" and said more troops and equipment had been mobilised than in previous years.
The drill began at a time when "the situation has grown so tense that a war may break out any moment," it added.
"No one can vouch that the US and the South Korean puppet bellicose forces will not play with fire against the DPRK while staging such dangerous war exercises."
It accused the new US administration of "working hard to infringe upon the sovereignty of the DPRK by force of arms" and of "seriously interfering in its internal affairs."
Analysts suspect the North is taking a tougher stance as it competes for US President Barack Obama’s attention with other world hotspots.
It has said it plans to launch a satellite into space, but both Seoul and Washington say the real purpose is to test a long-range Taepodong-2 missile that could theoretically reach Alaska.
The new US intelligence chief, Dennis Blair, said he believed the North is indeed planning a satellite launch but noted that the technology involved is "indistinguishable from intercontinental ballistic missiles."
"I tend to believe that the North Koreans announced that they are going to do a space launch, and I believe that that’s what they intend," he told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
He said that if a three-stage space launch vehicle worked, it could reach not only Alaska and Hawaii but parts of the continental United States.
Officials in Seoul and Washington say a launch for any purpose would breach a UN resolution passed after a previous and unsuccessful Taepodong-2 test in 2006.
Kim Yeon-Chul, director of the Hankyoreh Peace Research Institute in Seoul, said Wednesday’s foreign ministry statement "means the North is likely to go ahead with what it calls a space vehicle launch."
Kim told AFP the North wants to expand the agenda of future negotiations with Washington "to include not only its nuclear programmes and missiles but military situations on the Korean peninsula as well."
The Pyongyang regime is also angry at South Korea’s conservative President Lee Myung-Bak, who has scrapped his predecessors’ policy of offering virtually unconditional aid to Pyongyang.
However, on Tuesday it reopened the border to South Koreans working at a joint industrial estate one day after it effectively shutting the frontier by cutting the military communications links.