North Korea has called a decade-old agreement with South Korea to keep the peninsula nuclear weapons-free a "dead document" and blamed the United States for its demise.
In a statement denouncing Washington on the eve of a White House summit between US President Mr George W. Bush and South Korean counterpart Mr Roh Moo-Hyun, the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said the 1992 North-South pact had been nullified despite Pyongyang's own "positive efforts" to implement it.
"Ever since the publication of the North-South joint declaration on the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula the US adopted it as its policy to systematically and completely ditch it and has stood in the way of its realization in every way," KCNA said in a lengthy statement.
The agreement was the last legal international restraint on North Korean nuclear ambitions after the Stalinist regime pulled out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and abandoned a 1994 arms control accord with the United States.
"The Bush administration has systematically and completely torpedoed the process of denuclearisation on the Korean peninsula," KCNA said. "The inter-Korean declaration on denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula was thus reduced to a dead document".
South Korean President Roh, visiting the United States on his first foreign trip since taking office in February, meets Mr Bush at the White House tomorrow.
North Korea said last month in talks with the United States in Beijing that it had nuclear weapons and was reprocessing thousands of spent fuel rods that could provide plutonium for several more within months.
KCNA said the lesson North Korea had learned from the US-led war in Iraq was to arm itself with a "deterrent force" capable of repelling any attack.
AFP