North Korean soldiers look at the South Korean side at the Panmunjom truce village

SEOUL, May 26 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - North Korea on Monday, May 26, threatened to inflict "unimaginable disaster" on South Korea which it accused of escalating the danger of war on the Korean peninsula.

Last week North Korea sparked an outcry from South Korea and caused a three-day suspension of inter-Korean economic cooperation talks by threatening to bring "unspeakable disaster" to the capitalist South.

This time the threat came from North Korea's powerful Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland, a cabinet-level organization that directs relations with South Korea, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Pyongyang has turned up the volume of condemnation of South Korea since South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun and U.S.          President George W. Bush agreed at a summit in Washington on May 14 that "further steps" may be necessary to counter the North's nuclear weapons drive.

In a joint statement Roh and Bush also linked long-standing economic projects between North and South Korea to Pyongyang's actions on the nuclear crisis.

At North-South talks last week in Pyongyang North Korea expressed anger at South Korea, accusing it of aligning itself with the Bush administration's hard-line policy towards Pyongyang.

It also demanded an explanation from South Korea concerning those "further steps."

That explanation clearly did not go far enough, according to the North's reunification committee statement released by the Korean Central News Agency on Monday.

"The South side can neither explain the grave reality with a few words nor avoid the responsibility for escalating the danger of a war on the Korean peninsula and creating North-South confrontation," it said.

"The South side should not try to cover the truth with a poor excuse but recognize its wrongdoing and apologize to the nation."

It added that if South Korea "continued to cooperate with foreign forces in defiance of the repeated warnings of the north, the inter-Korean relations would be brought to naught and it would face an unimaginable disaster."

The new threat is sure to exasperate South Korea.

Despite the North's threat of disaster, South Korean negotiators agreed last week in Pyongyang to continue cooperation on economic programs with the Stalinist North and also to supply 400,000 tons of rice to the impoverished nation.