The Glade 4.0

NKorea warns US drill, sanctions endanger region
MARGIE MASONMARGIE MASON, Associated Press Writer

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — North Korea on Thursday warned the United States that imposing fresh sanctions and holding military drills with South Korea this weekend will endanger the entire region and destroy hopes for a nuke-free Korean peninsula.

The remarks precede an Asian security meeting in the Vietnamese capital, Hanoi, on Friday, attended by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the top diplomats from both Koreas four months after the sinking of a South Korean warship that killed 46 sailors. The North has been blamed but denies responsibility.

"If the U.S. is really interested in the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, it should halt the military exercises and sanctions that destroy the mood for dialogue," North Korean spokesman Ri Tong Il told reporters on the sidelines of meetings Thursday.

Sanctions, he said, escalate the U.S.'s "hostile policy toward North Korea."

On Wednesday, Washington announced it would impose new sanctions aimed at stifling the North's nuclear activities. Ri said any new sanctions would be in violation of a U.N. Security Council statement approved earlier this month that condemned the sinking but stopped short of directly assigning blame.

Regarding the naval drills the U.S. and South Korea plan this weekend, Ri told Yonhap news agency, "Such a move presents a grave threat to the peace and security not only to the Korean peninsula, but to the region."

He later said the North is willing to meet the U.S. and Japan on the sidelines of Friday's security meeting if they request it, but no such proposals have come, Yonhap reported.

Seoul has said there will be no one-on-one meetings with the North until an apology is issued for the sinking of the navy ship Cheonan. Clinton and representatives from all other parties in the stalled nuclear talks will be in Vietnam, but diplomats have said a meeting among them is unlikely.

In a sign of how tense relations are — and how difficult such meetings would be — U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates struck back Thursday at North Korea's criticism of the military drills. "My response to that is that I condemn their sinking of the Cheonan," Gates said to reporters in Jakarta, Indonesia.

South Korea has said the naval drills are defensive training exercises that do not violate the U.N. Security Council statement and that the sanctions are not to avenge the ship sinking but instead target the North's illicit nuclear activities.

A South Korean foreign ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press, accused North Korean Foreign Minister Pak Ui Chun of using the meeting in Vietnam to look for friends.

"North Korea's foreign minister has been very busy hanging out and trying to gain support from other countries," the official said. "Many countries support South Korea's position, and nobody likes North Korea."

Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa said he wasn't surprised the North was upset about the drills, but that South Korea and the U.S. have the right to conduct the military exercises.

"They can be angry on many things," he told reporters, speaking in English. "If you Google North Korea every day, you find all kinds of angry words, and I'll be in trouble if I follow my policy based on their state of emotion."

An international investigation concluded the North sunk the ship by torpedo attack. The two Koreas remain in a state of war because a peace treaty was never signed to end their three-year war in the 1950s. Pyongyang cites the presence of 28,500 U.S. troops on South Korean soil as a main reason it needs to build nuclear weapons to defend itself.

North Korea vehemently denies any involvement in the sinking, and has asked the U.N. Command governing the armistice to let the regime conduct its own investigation. Military officers from the command and North Korea were to meet along the heavily fortified border that divides the peninsula, known as the Demilitarized Zone, on Friday.

The 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations are now caught in the middle of a diplomatic tug-of-war, with the two Koreas battling over the exact wording of one paragraph in a regional security statement about the sinking. The statement will be issued Friday by ASEAN, along with 17 other nations that include the United States, Japan and both Koreas.

The North and its main ally China are pushing to avoid any terse wording, while South Korea and its staunch backer the United States want tough language condemning the attack and nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula.

There was similar haggling earlier in the week during the ASEAN's foreign ministers meeting, which concluded with a watered-down version of what South Korea wanted. The ministers' statement "deplored" the ship sinking, but characterized it as an "incident" instead of an "attack."

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Associated Press writers Jim Gomez and Tran Van Minh in Hanoi, Kwang-tae Kim in Seoul, South Korea, and Joe Cochrane in Jakarta, Indonesia, contributed to this report.

US aircraft carrier leads drills with South Korea
ERIC TALMADGEERIC TALMADGE, Associated Press Writer

ABOARD USS GEORGE WASHINGTON (AP) — A nuclear-powered U.S. supercarrier led an armada of warships in exercises off the Korean peninsula on Sunday that North Korea has vowed to physically block and says could escalate into nuclear war.

U.S. military officials said the maneuvers, conducted with South Korean ships and Japanese observers, were intended to send a strong signal to the North that aggression in the region will not be tolerated.

Tensions on the Korean peninsula have been particularly high since the sinking in March of a South Korean naval vessel. Forty-six Korean sailors were killed in the sinking, which Seoul has called Pyongyang's worst military attack on it since the 1950-53 Korean War.

The military drills, code-named "Invincible Spirit," are to run through Wednesday with about 8,000 U.S. and South Korean troops, 20 ships and submarines and 200 aircraft. The Nimitz-class USS George Washington was deployed from Japan.

"We are showing our resolve," said Capt. David Lausman, the carrier's commanding officer.

North Korea has protested the drills, threatening to retaliate with "nuclear deterrence" and "sacred war."

The North routinely threatens attacks whenever South Korea and the U.S. hold joint military drills, which Pyongyang sees as a rehearsal for an invasion. The U.S. keeps 28,500 troops in South Korea and another 50,000 in Japan, but says it has no intention of invading the North.

Still, the North's latest rhetoric carries extra weight following the sinking of the Cheonan.

Capt. Ross Myers, the commander of the carrier's air wing, said the exercises were not intended to raise tensions, but acknowledged they are meant to get North Korea's attention.

The George Washington, one of the biggest ships in the U.S. Navy, is a potent symbol of American military power, with about 5,000 sailors and aviators and the capacity to carry up to 70 planes.

"North Korea may contend that it is a provocation, but I would say the opposite," he said. "It is a provocation to those who don't want peace and stability. North Korea doesn't want this. They know that one of South Korea's strengths is its alliance with the United States."

He said that North Korea's threats to retaliate were being taken seriously.

"There is a lot they can do," he said. "They have ships, they have subs, they have airplanes. They are a credible threat."

The exercises are the first in a series of U.S.-South Korean maneuvers to be conducted in the East Sea off South Korea's east coast and in the Yellow Sea closer to China's shores in international waters. The exercises also are the first to employ the F-22 stealth fighter — which can evade North Korean air defenses — in South Korea.

South Korea was closely monitoring North Korea's military but spotted no unusual activity Sunday, the Defense Ministry said.

North Korea, which denies any involvement in the sinking of the Cheonan, warned the United States against holding the drills.

"Our military and people will squarely respond to the nuclear war preparation by the American imperialists and the South Korean puppet regime with our powerful nuclear deterrent," the North's government-run Minju Joson newspaper said in a commentary Sunday headlined, "We also have nuclear weapons."

The commentary was carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

The North's powerful National Defense Commission issued a similar threat Saturday, saying the country "will start a retaliatory sacred war ... based on nuclear deterrent any time necessary in order to counter the U.S."

The country's Foreign Ministry separately said Saturday that Pyongyang is considering "powerful physical measures" in response to the U.S. military drills and sanctions.

Though the impoverished North has a large conventional military and the capability to build nuclear weapons, it is not believed to have the technology needed to use nuclear devices as warheads.

North Korea has been in increasingly difficult diplomatic straits since the Cheonan incident.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced Wednesday, after visiting the Demilitarized Zone dividing the two Koreas, that the U.S. would slap new sanctions on the North to stifle its nuclear ambitions and punish it for the Cheonan sinking.

On Friday, the European Union said it, too, would consider new sanctions on North Korea.

The George Washington had been expected to join in exercises off Korea sooner, but the Navy delayed those plans as the United Nations Security Council met to deliberate what action it should take over the Cheonan sinking.

The council eventually condemned the incident, but stopped short of naming North Korea as the perpetrator.

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Associated Press writer Hyung-jin Kim in Seoul contributed to this report.