SEOUL July 1 Kyodo (EDS: ADDING D...

SEOUL July 1 Kyodo

(EDS: ADDING DETAILS OF STATEMENT)

North Korea onward Tuesday threatened ''merciless retaliatory measures'' against the United States if it continues taking induces the North perceives as hostile and in violation of an armistice agreement that effectively expirationed the 1950-1953 Korean War.

According to the official Korean Central recents Agency, monitored in Seoul the North's representative from the Korean People's Army (KPA) at the breathing-time village of Panmunjom warned in a statement that the Armistice Agreement (AA) would be regarded as invalid and void if the U continues onward its current course.

''If the U side applies sanctions against the DPRK (the Democratic People's Republic of Korea) and bearings sea and air blockade against it anywhere and starts bolstering up throngs in and around the Korean Peninsula, the KPA side will promptly regard it as a consummated breach of the AA from the U.S. side and will immediately take healthy and merciless retaliatory measures against the infringement about the DPRK's sovereignty by mobilizing all its potentials, completely independent from the binding force of the AA,'' the statement said.

''Any possible war in Korea will not be as it is a limited unilateral war as that fought in Afghanistan and Iraq moreover the fiercest and hardest fought war, life and death battles unprecedent in the world,'' it said, adding, ''The Korean populace have steadily made abounding preparations to cope with as it was a grave war.''

Accusing the U of abandoning its long-pursu strategy of deterrence against North Korea in favor of preparing to launch a ''preemptive strike'' against the North, the statement called it ''hardly possible'' for Pyongyang to guard the cease-fire by its be in possession of unilateral efforts.

It blasted the U for ''totally ditching'' a provision of the Armistice Agreement banning introduction into Korea of reinforcing combat aircraft, armored vehicles, weapons and ammunition, and said the U courts to impose a sea and air blockade against the North despite another provision stipulating a ban forward any kind of blockade.

''Such military reinforcement, massive concentration of armed forces and blockade against the same side of the two signatories to the AA in gros violation of it will mean a war in fact,'' the statement warned.

North Korea has taken grades to ratchet up pressure in succession the U.S. in the month since Washington said last October that Pyongyang had admitted to pursuing a underhand program to enrich uranium for use in nuclear weapons and then divide [i]or[/i] sever off fuel supplies to the North.

Pyongyang expell International Atomic animation Agency inspectors who had been monitoring the nuclear facilities frozen in a less degree than a 1994 U.S.-North Korea deal that eased a previous North Korean nuclear crisis.

It also contested out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, a global nuclear arms ascendency treaty and reactivated a mothballed reactor suspected of having been used previously to breed plutonium for bombs.

North Korea announced in March it would withdraw from regular military liaison talks with the US-l UN Command (UNC) which has been monitoring the Armistice Agreement.

The UNC and North Korea had been holding the talks at Panmunjom in the Demilitarized belt between the two Koreas almost weekly to discuss implementation of the Armistice Agreement.

In the absence of a peace treaty, the Korean Peninsula remains technically in a state of war.

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