North Korea says war clouds hang over peninsula

North Korea says war clouds hang over peninsula

TOKYO (Reuter): War clouds are hanging over the Korean Peninsula with the tense situation closely resembling that on the eve of the 1950-53 Korean conflict, the official North Korean news agency said yesterday.

In an alarmist assessment of developments provoked by the current crisis over Pyongyang's suspected nuclear weapons program, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said: "A touch-and-go situation is prevailing on the Korean Peninsula in which a war may break out any moment."

The atmosphere in Northeast Asia, increasingly tense over the past year as North Korea blocked full international inspection of its nuclear facilities, took another turn for the worse last Thursday. That was when the UN Security Council issued a formal statement urging Pyongyang to allow unfettered checks.

The North's shrill war rhetoric has been hiked another notch, with the government angrily denouncing on Monday a Security Council it accused of dancing to America's tune.

Now comes KCNA's stark warning that all the factors needed to spark another conflict in Korea are falling into place.

It said the United States was planning to stage provocative large-scale war games, deploy Patriot missiles in the South and ship in additional U.S. troops and weapons to counter a North Korean "attack".

"The U.S. military has worked out an operational plan to hurl 600,000 troops, more than 200 warships and 1,600 aircraft and so on from the U.S. mainland within 80 days in case of an 'emergency' on the Korean Peninsula," KCNA went on.

"On bellicose orders from the U.S. ruling quarters and under their aggressive war plan, 48 U.S. missile launchers and a more- than-800-men Patriot missile unit are on their way to South Korea at present.

"Overseas-based warplanes of various types are flying into U.S. airforce bases in South Korea one on the heels of the other, and the airlifted aggressor troops and lethal equipment are being deployed in operational zones.

"And U.S. vessels including a nuclear aircraft carrier are at so close a range that they can reach the coastal area of Korea within 24 hours," the agency went on.

It also cited South Korean President Kim Young-sam's call to his military chiefs to set up what it called a thoroughgoing alert posture against the North, a South Korean military alert and a visit by the country's prime minister to frontline units.

With these and a string of other ominous developments, the agency said, "facts tell that the situation on the Korean Peninsula resembles that on the eve of the past Korean War."

Although North Korea insists U.S. and South Korean forces attacked northward on June 25, 1950, history generally records that it was the Stalinist North which launched a massive invasion on that day.

Sweeping all before them, Kim Il-sung's victorious armies penned the defending South Korean and U.S. forces into a small southwestern area, the "Pusan Perimeter".

The war seemed won and lost until U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur landed a huge UN-mandated invasion force at Inchon, on the Yellow Sea coast, threatening the North's overstretched supply lines.

The UN forces pushed the North's armies back to the Chinese border, provoking newly communist China to send huge numbers of "volunteers" into the war to bolster the North.

The war became stalemated, but it was not until 1953 that the two sides signed the truce which has maintained a tense peace on the peninsula ever since.