Pyongyang vows to scrap peace pacts with South

Pyongyang is renowned for its bellicose rhetoric, but the tone has reached a frenzied pitch in recent days, fueling concerns of a border clash with both North and South planning major military exercises next week.

It has even threatened a “pre-emptive nuclear attack” against the United States and South Korea — a notion dismissed as bluster by analysts, but not without dangerous, underlying intent.

North Korea “abrogates all agreements on non-aggression reached between the North and the South,” the state-run Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea (CPRK) said Friday.

The CPRK said the pacts would be voided as of Monday, the same day that Pyongyang has vowed to rip up the 1953 armistice agreement that ended Korean War hostilities.

It also announced the immediate severing of a North-South hotline installed in 1971.

State television, meanwhile, showed North Korean leader Kim Jong Un laying preparations for “all-out war” as he visited a frontline military unit involved in the shelling of a South Korean island in 2010.

The November shelling came eight months after the sinking of a South Korean naval vessel with the loss of 46 lives that was also blamed on Pyongyang.

While North Korea is not deemed capable of any nuclear strike on the U.S. mainland, there are growing fears that it will mount some provocation in the form of a missile test or a similar artillery assault.

“To me, this feels like the most dangerous situation since the Korean War,” said Paik Hak-soon, a North Korean analyst at the Sejong Institute in Seoul.

“The North is cornered more than ever in the international community and will keep pushing ahead with even more confrontational moves militarily,” Paik told AFP.

South Korea's new president, Park Geun-hye, who was sworn in less than two weeks ago, said the situation had become “very grave” but vowed to “deal strongly” with any provocation from the North.

The CPRK statement came hours after the U.N. Security Council beefed up existing sanctions on the communist state in response to its Feb. 12 nuclear test.

The resolution adopted by the 15-member Council tightened restrictions on North Korea's financial dealings, notably its suspect “bulk cash” transfers.

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