NORTH Korea says it is no longer bound by the armistice that ended the Korean War in 1953 and it will attack any force attempting to halt or inspect its ships.
The North was responding in blood-curdling tones, via its military mission to the joint security area of the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), to South Korea's decision to join the Proliferation Security Initiative, calling it a declaration of war.
"If the armistice agreement is terminated, the Korean peninsula in terms of law is bound to return to the state of war and our revolutionary forces will get to move on to pertinent military actions," the mission said in a statement carried by the Korean Central News Agency.
There were unconfirmed reports from Seoul yesterday that the plutonium reprocessing plant at the Yongbyon nuclear complex had resumed operations.
Yongbyon, the source of plutonium for the North's bomb program, was supposed to be disabled and ultimately dismantled under the 2007 six-party agreement, which Pyongyang repudiated in April.
As feared by outside governments trying to sanction or restrain the Kim Jong-il regime following Monday's atomic-bomb test, its leadership has responded with another volley of provocations.
The "permanent five" of the UN Security Council, plus Japan and South Korea, were reportedly moving steadily towards a condemnation of the North's breach of the Resolution 1718 forbidding another nuclear test after the first, in October 2006. Read more.