SEOUL, May 27 — North Korea, facing international sanction for this week’s nuclear test, threatened today to attack the South after Seoul joined a US-led initiative to check vessels suspected of carrying equipment for weapons of mass destruction.
A North Korean army spokesman also said the country was no longer bound by the armistice signed at the end of the 1950-53 Korean War because Washington had ignored its responsibility as a signatory by drawing South Korea into its naval initiative.
The threat comes after South Korean media reported earlier that Pyongyang had restarted a plant that makes weapons-grade plutonium.
“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,” the spokesman for the North’s army was quoted as saying by the official KCNA news agency.
South Korea announced yesterday it was joining the naval exercise, called the Proliferation Security Initiative.
Pyongyang also appeared to have fired a third short-range missile late yesterday after it added to tensions with a launch of two others earlier in the day, the South’s Yonhap news agency quoted a unnamed government source as saying.
US President Barack Obama is working to form a united response to Monday’s nuclear test, widely denounced as a major threat to stability that violates UN resolutions and brings the reclusive North closer to having a reliable nuclear bomb.
The secretive state 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 including steam coming out of the facility,” it quoted an unnamed government source as saying.
The Soviet-era Yongbyon plant was being taken apart under a six-country disarmament-for-aid deal and there were no signs yet that the North, which conducted its only prior nuclear test in October 2006, was again separating plutonium.
Seoul’s financial markets, which had fallen in the wake of the nuclear test, rose today though traders said investors were still nervous about when the North would try to be more provocative and ratchet up tension in the region.
Analysts say Pyongyang’s military grandstanding is partly aimed at tightening leader Kim Jong-il’s grip on power so he can better engineer his succession and divert attention from the country’s weak economy, which has fallen into near ruin since he took over in 1994.
Many speculate Kim’s suspected stroke in August raised concerns about succession and he wants his third son to be the next leader of Asia’s only communist dynasty. — Reuters
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