North Korea said today it would treat any new US high-tech weapons deployed in South Korea as tactical nuclear weapons and respond in kind.
The latest rhetorical twist in Pyongyang's standoff with Washington came soon after US President George W Bush and South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun agreed in a telephone call to keep pushing for multilateral talks on the North's nuclear aims.
A North Korean statement - issued to mark the July 27 50th anniversary of the truce that ended Korean War fighting - said the United States was "trying to complicate the nuclear issue" by avoiding the bilateral talks Pyongyang favours.
But it stopped short of ruling out multilateral talks, which seem likely to take place in a few weeks, according to diplomats.
The United States is considering deploying more modern weapons systems in South Korea, where 37,000 U.S. troops are based to augment the 690,000-strong South Korean forces and ward off any attack by North Korea's 1.1-million-man army.
The North Korean statement noted this mooted deployment.
"The DPRK (North Korea) will consider the ultra-modern weapons the new conservatives of the U.S. try to use as tactical nuclear weapons, which compels the DPRK to make as powerful weapons as them," it said.
North Korea has said it has nuclear weapons and is trying to build more, but the United States and its allies are unable to confirm whether this is true or high-stakes diplomatic bluffing.
It was not clear whether the latest statement fitted into a past pattern of making threats before concessions.
The South Korean presidential Blue House said Roh and Bush spoke about the nuclear crisis for 15 minutes on Thursday.
"The two presidents reconfirmed North Korea's nuclear programme should be abolished in a method which can prove it is completely irreversible and they agreed to continue their effort to push for multilateral talks," the Blue House said.
The lengthy North Korean statement, which was carried by the official KCNA news agency, accused the United States of systematically undermining the Armistice Agreement that was signed on July 27, 1953. The two Koreas are technically still at war because the agreement was not a peace treaty.
"Fifty years have passed since the conclusion of the Korean Armistice Agreement," said the ministry statement.
"But durable peace has not yet settled on the Korean peninsula in the 21st century, but the danger of a nuclear war is increasing on the peninsula. This is entirely attributable to the US military presence in South Korea and its anachronistic hostile policy toward the DPRK (North Korea)."
It said the nuclear crisis should find "a fundamental solution" through direct U.S.-North Korean talks.
The statement said Washington wanted to block improvements in the North's relations with Japan and South Korea, sell more weapons to the South and thus help boost Bush's presidential re-election chances next year.