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SEOUL, March 1: North Korea accused the United States on Saturday of stepping up spy flights as a preparation for war as South Korea’s new president vowed to work for a swift, peaceful end to the nuclear crisis on the peninsula.
“The US imperialists committed over 180 cases of aerial espionage against the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) in February by mobilising strategic and tactical reconnaissance planes on different missions,” the North’s official KCNA news agency said, quoting military sources.
The agency said an RC-135 strategic reconnaissance aircraft — the plane used to probe Soviet air defences during the Cold War — “illegally intruded into the air above the territorial waters in the East Sea (Sea of Japan)... almost every day from February 21 and made shuttle flights in the air for hours to spy on major targets in its east coastal area”.
KCNA said other spy flights were carried out by a U-2 high-altitude plane and an EP-3 electronic reconnaissance aircraft.
The US military had also mobilised at least 130 warplanes on February 25 alone for attack drills in South Korea, it said, concluding:
“All these espionage flights and air war games clearly indicate the desperate efforts of the US to start a war against the DPRK.”
“These unceasing US war drills drive the situation on the Korean peninsula to such a dangerous pitch of tension that a nuclear war may break out on it any moment,” KCNA said in another report.
“The DPRK is keeping itself fully ready to repel the US military attack,” it added.
The US military command in Seoul, the South Korean capital, could not be reached for comment.
Tensions over North Korea’s suspected nuclear weapons plans spiked on Wednesday after Washington, citing satellite photographs, said North Korean scientists had fired up a reactor mothballed since 1994 at the Yongbyon complex, north of Pyongyang.
US officials and congressional sources said later scientists were also readying a plutonium reprocessing plant at the same complex, and could have it operating as a source of weapons-grade material within a month.
South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun told his country of 48 million on Saturday he “firmly opposed” the North’s suspected drive to build nuclear weapons, adding: “North Korea’s nuclear issue is the task we should resolve immediately.”
PEACEFUL OUTCOME: He stressed, however, that he would seek a peaceful resolution, saying keeping South Koreans safe was the biggest duty of his government, inaugurated on Tuesday.
“If peace on the Korean peninsula is broken, we cannot afford the huge disaster it would trigger,” he said.
The liberal new president has been at odds with the United States over how to cope with the four-month-old nuclear crisis which North Korea has escalated step by step as Washington tried to focus its attention on disarming and possibly attacking Iraq.
Washington says it has no plans to invade the North but adds that prudence requires keeping all options open.
In a separate development, an international consortium overseeing the construction of two nuclear reactors in the North has agreed to slow the pace of the project, Kyodo news agency quoted Japanese government sources as saying.
The decision, if confirmed, is bound to anger power-starved North Korea. Pyongyang says it needs to restart Yongbyon to generate power after the United States and its partners in the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organisation (KEDO) agreed in November to halt fuel oil shipments to the North.—Reuters
