N Korea turns on South with new 'disaster' threat

Isolated North Korea threatened South Korea with "disaster" for the second time in a week Monday in anger at Seoul's tougher line on the nuclear crisis.

The new threat came three days after South Korea pledged to supply 400,000 tonnes of rice to the destitute Stalinist state that Washington says has admitted developing nuclear weapons and already possesses at least one or two.

Last week North Korea sparked an outcry from South Korea and caused a three-day suspension of inter-Korean economic cooperation talks by threatening to bring "unspeakable disaster" to the capitalist South.

Analysts said the language was the most menacing since a decade ago when North Korea threatened to turn Seoul into a "sea of fire."

This time the threat of "unimaginable disaster" came from North Korea's powerful Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland, a cabinet-level organization that directs relations with South Korea.

It warned that if Seoul "continued to cooperate with foreign forces in defiance of the repeated warnings of the North,... it would face an unimaginable disaster."

The outburst came just three days after North and South signed a series of cross-border cooperation accords and appeared to settle their differences over South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun's May 14 summit in Washington with US President George W. Bush.

That summit infuriated Pyongyang and confirmed recent signs that Seoul was hardening its position on North Korea. Bush and Roh agreed that "further steps" may be necessary to counter the North's nuclear weapons drive and also linked long-standing economic projects between North and South Korea to Pyongyang's actions on the nuclear crisis.

North-South talks last week in Pyongyang ground to a halt when an increasingly isolated North Korea accused Seoul of aligning with Washington and demanded an explanation for the reference to "further steps."

That explanation clearly did not go far enough, according to the North's reunification committee statement.

"The South side can neither explain the grave reality with a few words nor avoid the responsibility for escalating the danger of a war on the Korean peninsula and creating North-South confrontation," it said.