North Korea warns U.S., Japan of 'nuclear sea of fire'

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04268/384518.stm

North Korea warns U.S., Japan of 'nuclear sea of fire'

Friday, September 24, 2004

By Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times

SEOUL, South Korea -- In an unusually explicit threat to its neighbor yesterday, North Korea warned that Japan would be immersed in a "nuclear sea of fire" if the United States were to attack the North.

The threat came as Japanese and South Korean government officials expressed fears that North Korea was preparing to test a ballistic missile. Intelligence satellites have detected unusual movements of vehicles and personnel massing around missile bases on the east coast, South Korean and Japanese officials reported. South Korea yesterday said it believed that the movements were connected with annual military games taking place near the missile bases.

U. S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told reporters yesterday that a missile test "would be a very troubling matter."

Japan reportedly dispatched surveillance aircraft and a destroyer ship equipped with an Aegis weapons system, which allows it to track and destroy multiple aircraft targets.

Bellicose language from Pyongyang is usually dismissed as rhetoric, but this threat seems certain to inflame tensions.

"If the United States ignites a nuclear war in this part of the world, then U. S. bases in Japan would serve as a detonating fuse that would plunge Japan into a nuclear sea of fire," North Korea's paper, Rodong Sinmun, said in a commentary carried by the KCNA news agency. "If it wants to maintain peace and live safely, Japan should not become an appendage of the war strategy of American imperialism."

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who has made two trips to Pyongyang since 2002 in an effort to rebuild relations, downplayed the tensions with North Korea. After returning from New York at the end of an

11-day foreign trip, Koizumi told reporters there was a low probability that the North Koreans would launch a missile.

North Korea continues to balk at joining another round of six-nation talks on its nuclear program. "Pyongyang apparently wants to wait for the outcome of the U. S. presidential election in November," Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda said.