North Korea warns of 'thousand-fold' military retaliation | Top Russian news and analysis online | 'RIA Novosti' newswire

North Korea warns of 'thousand-fold' military retaliation | Top Russian news and analysis online | 'RIA Novosti' newswire

North Korea warned on Wednesday of an overwhelming military strike against the United States and its allies if they provoke the country.



The statement, carried by the communist state's official news agency KCNA, came a day after U.S. President Barack Obama called the North's nuclear program a "grave threat", and said the new sanctions against Pyongyang would be strictly enforced.

"If the US and its followers infringe upon our republic's sovereignty even a bit, our military and people will launch a one hundred or one thousand-fold retaliation, with a merciless military strike," the agency said.

Obama's comments on Tuesday came after a meeting with South Korean leader Lee Myung-bak in Washington, at which the sides agreed to build a "strategic alliance" to "work together to achieve the complete and verifiable elimination of North Korea's nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs, as well as ballistic missile programs."

The presidents' meeting came amid North Korea's threats to strengthen its nuclear arsenal, in defiance of a UN Security Council resolution passed after its May 25 nuclear test.

Both presidents urged the North to change its confrontational stance.

"We urge North Korea not to make any unacceptable demands because we really do not know what will happen if they keep on this path," Lee told reporters after the talks.

The U.S. leader said: "there has been a pattern in the past where North Korea behaves in a belligerent fashion and, if it waits long enough, it is rewarded... I think that is the pattern they have come to expect. The message we are sending them is that we are going to break that pattern."





Lets not forget who gave them their nuclear power ....


Sunday, Sept. 12, 2004 10:13 p.m. EDT

Albright: North Korea 'Cheated' on Clinton Nuke Agreement

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright admitted for the first time on Sunday that under the Clinton administration's Agreed Framework arms control treaty with Kim Jong-il, North Korea "cheated."

Asked point-blank if North Korea developed nuclear weapons during the Clinton administration, Albright told NBC's "Meet the Press," "No, what they were doing, as it turns out, they were cheating."

"The worst part that has happened under the Agreed Framework," Albright said, was that "there [were] these fuel rods, and the nuclear program was frozen."

But because of North Korea's cheating, she explained, "those fuel rods have now been reprocessed, as far as we know, and North Korea has a capability, which at one time might have been two potential nuclear weapons, up to six to eight now, we're not really clear."

Albright's comments came less than 24 hours after reports surfaced that Pyongyang detonated what some said was its first above-ground nuclear test – though experts later said the mushroom-cloud explosion witnessed by tens of thousands was a non-nuclear event.

In a February 2003 interview, Albright boasted to NBC, "When we had the Agreed Framework, we did freeze those fuel rods, and had we not, in the last years, we would have somewhere, people calculate, 50 to 100 nuclear weapons."

A 1999 congressional study determined that Pyongyang was cheating on the agreement, but Albright disregarded the warning and continued to claim that the Agreed Framework was a success.