North Korea denounces US-SKorea military drill

Seoul, Mar 25: North Korea said joint US-South Korean military exercises that started today are poisoning international talks to end Pyongyang's pursuit of nuclear weapons and will lead it to boost its ''self-defensive deterrence''.

Although US-South Korean joint training drills have gone ahead for decades without major incident, communist North Korea typically reserves some of its harshest language to denounce them, casting them as a prelude to an invasion and nuclear war.

''The US would be well advised to stop at once its reckless war exercises against the DPRK (North Korea), which are harmful to the settlement of the nuclear issue and peace of the Korean peninsula and driving the situation to a phase of confrontation and war,'' its KCNA news agency quoted a government official as saying.

''The army and people of the DPRK will bolster the self-defensive deterrence for defending the dignity and sovereignty of the Korean nation to cope with the provocative moves of the US and South Korean warmongers for a war of aggression against it,'' the official said.

Six-way talks on scrapping North Korea's nuclear weapons ground to a halt earlier this month with Pyongyang demanding the return of some 25 million dollars of its assets frozen in a Macau bank due to suspected use in illicit activity.

The US military, which stations some 30,000 troops in South Korea under a long-standing defence pact, will conduct its annual training exercises with South Korea through March 31.

It has informed the North's army of the drills and reassured Pyongyang they were not meant to be provocative.

The rival Korean states are still technically at war having never signed a formal peace treaty to end their 1950-1953 conflict. A fraying armistice still holds after more than half a century, freezing the nation's division.

The joint military training, dubbed RSOI Foal Eagle, involve about 29,000 US troops and an undisclosed number of South Korean troops, a US Forces Korea spokesman said.

He said some 6,000 US troops stationed outside the peninsula would take part in the drills, along with a US aircraft carrier group.

North Korea has a 1.2 million-strong standing military, most of whom are stationed near the heavily fortified border.

Reuters