Communist North Korea (news - web sites) declared a decade-old agreement with South Korea (news - web sites) 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.
The agreement was the last legal 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.
Last month China warned North Korea that pursuit of nuclear weapons would breach the joint North-South accord, while South Korea also reminded Pyongyang it was still bound by the agreement.
"The Bush administration has systematically and completely torpedoed the process of denuclearization on the Korean peninsula," KCNA said. "The inter-Korean declaration on denuclearization of the Korean peninsula was thus reduced to a dead document ..."
A top South Korean official travelling with Roh said the Seoul government had received no official word from North Korea concerning the accord.
"We need a review of this problem in talks with the United States. However I think the North Korean authorities have not officially declared it nullified yet," Roh's foreign policy advisor Ban Ki-Moon told journalists.
Roh, visiting the United States on his first foreign trip since taking office in February, meets with Bush at the White House on Wednesday.
The two leaders will discuss the seven-month-old nuclear crisis sparked by Pyongyang's reported admission in October that it was developing nuclear weapons through an enriched uranium programme.
US officials believe that North Korea has already diverted enough plutonium from a separate nuclear programme frozen under the now-defunct 1994 accord for one or two atomic bombs.
Washington is insisting that Pyongyang scrap its nuclear programmes as a first step before negotiations to resolve the crisis can progress. North Korean wants Washington to drop its "hostile" policy towards the Stalinist regime first.
In a separate dispatch, KCNA said it was this hostile US policy that had soured North Korea's efforts to improve ties with South Korea and Japan and compelled the Stalinist state to build its own "deterrent force."
The South Korean president is an advocate of engagement with the North but has been increasingly criticial of the Pyongyang regime while Japan has frozen efforts begun last year to normalize ties with North Korea.
The United States said North Korea had admitted possessing nuclear weapons during exploratory talks in Beijing last month, and was reproceesing 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 (news - web sites) 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."
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.
The agreement was the last legal 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.
Last month China warned North Korea that pursuit of nuclear weapons would breach the joint North-South accord, while South Korea also reminded Pyongyang it was still bound by the agreement.
"The Bush administration has systematically and completely torpedoed the process of denuclearization on the Korean peninsula," KCNA said. "The inter-Korean declaration on denuclearization of the Korean peninsula was thus reduced to a dead document ..."
A top South Korean official travelling with Roh said the Seoul government had received no official word from North Korea concerning the accord.
"We need a review of this problem in talks with the United States. However I think the North Korean authorities have not officially declared it nullified yet," Roh's foreign policy advisor Ban Ki-Moon told journalists.
Roh, visiting the United States on his first foreign trip since taking office in February, meets with Bush at the White House on Wednesday.
The two leaders will discuss the seven-month-old nuclear crisis sparked by Pyongyang's reported admission in October that it was developing nuclear weapons through an enriched uranium programme.
US officials believe that North Korea has already diverted enough plutonium from a separate nuclear programme frozen under the now-defunct 1994 accord for one or two atomic bombs.
Washington is insisting that Pyongyang scrap its nuclear programmes as a first step before negotiations to resolve the crisis can progress. North Korean wants Washington to drop its "hostile" policy towards the Stalinist regime first.
In a separate dispatch, KCNA said it was this hostile US policy that had soured North Korea's efforts to improve ties with South Korea and Japan and compelled the Stalinist state to build its own "deterrent force."
The South Korean president is an advocate of engagement with the North but has been increasingly criticial of the Pyongyang regime while Japan has frozen efforts begun last year to normalize ties with North Korea.
The United States said North Korea had admitted possessing nuclear weapons during exploratory talks in Beijing last month, and was reproceesing 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 (news - web sites) 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."
