U.S. Under Secretary of State for Security and Arms Control was “unwell”

SEOUL, January 23 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Continued American aggression will lead to war on the Korean peninsula, Pyongyang’s official news media said Thursday, January 23, as it stepped up the rhetoric against the United States.

The Rodong Sinmun, the newspaper of the ruling Workers Party, lashed out at reports that the United States and South Korea were establishing military plans for any potential conflict on the Korean peninsula, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

“(The plan) is nothing but a scenario of aggression that makes the outbreak of the second Korean war a fait accompli,” the Rodong Sinmun said in an editorial.

The paper said that North Korea was “ready both for dialogue and war”.

“Preemptive strike”

“Anyone who attempts to make a preemptive strike at the DPRK (North Korea) can never go safe,” it warned.

The fresh outburst came as a senior five-man North Korean delegation was in Seoul offering public reassurances that there would be no military conflict on the Korean peninsula.

“The position of the DPRK (North Korea) is that it will not bring the stand-off with the United States to the worst-case scenario,” an unidentified North Korean delegate to the talks said, according to the Seoul’s Hankyoreh daily.

“You don’t have to worry about it too much.”

The term “worst-case scenario” has been used here to describe a war breaking out on the Korean peninsula.

The talks are being held against the backdrop of international fears over North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, after the collapse of a 1994 agreement between Pyongyang and Washington that froze the Stalinist state’s atomic program.

The United States has led an international drive for the crisis to be brought before the United Nations Security Council, a push that has so far been unsuccessful.

Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) launched a separate broadside on Thursday, accusing the United States of having no intention of establishing a bilateral dialogue to solve the crisis.

It referred to recent comments made by U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that “all options were on the table”, in regards to North Korea.

“His remarks prove that the U.S. is paying lip service to ‘dialogue’ and ‘peaceful settlement’... and its hostile policy to isolate and stifle it (North Korea) remains unchanged,” KCNA said.

The report said North Korea was convinced the United States was “waiting for a chance to invade it”.

U.S. Arms Control Chief in Japan

Meanwhile, U.S. arms control chief John Bolton arrived in Tokyo Thursday on the final leg of an Asian trip to discuss the North Korea’s crisis.

But meetings scheduled for later in the day with Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi and vice foreign minister Yukio Takeuchi were called off because the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Security and Arms Control was unwell, U.S. and Japanese officials said.

“Mr Bolton is ill and has had to alter his schedule,” a spokesman for the United States embassy said.

A spokeswoman for the Japanese foreign ministry said it was undecided whether Bolton would meet with Kawaguchi and Takeuchi on Friday.

He is still scheduled to attend a Japan-U.S. meeting on arms control and nuclear non-proliferation Friday, however.

North Korea expelled IAEA inspectors on New Year’s Eve and withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty last month as a response to U.S. cut of fuel.

Pyongyang has said that it would regard U.N. sanctions as a declaration of war