North Korea Threatens To Reduce South Korea To ?Ashes? At Slightest Provocation

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea continued Sunday to lash out at the new conservative government in Seoul, threatening to reduce the South to “ashes” if the South Korean government made the “slightest move” to attack.

The warning, one of the harshest in years, was a response to a statement by Kim Tae-young, the head of the South’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, that his military would strike suspected North Korean nuclear weapons sites if Pyongyang attempted to attack the South with atomic bombs.

North Korea typically makes incendiary statements toward the United States and South Korea when Washington and Seoul conduct joint military exercises or when the countries put pressure on the hard-line government of Kim Jong-il to change its policies. The South Korean government did not respond immediately to the warning Sunday.

The North Korean statement, made by an unidentified military affairs commentator at Pyongyang’s state-run Korean Central News Agency, also reiterated the North’s threat to end all inter-Korean government contacts unless Seoul apologized for Mr. Kim’s remark, which it described as “war mongering.”

“Everything will be in ashes, not just a sea of fire, if our advanced pre-emptive strike once begins,” the commentator was quoted as saying.

South Korea’s new president, Lee Myung-bak, unveiled a major shift last week from the policies of his two liberal predecessors, whose governments had provided billions of dollars of aid for the impoverished North. Mr. Lee said he would drastically curtail such aid unless Pyongyang abandoned its nuclear programs.

Since Thursday, the North has expelled South Korean officials at a joint factory park in the North, test-fired a volley of missiles and threatened to scuttle a deal it made last October to disable its nuclear facilities and give a full list of its nuclear programs in exchange for aid and diplomatic concessions.

At the height of a 1993-94 crisis over the North’s efforts to build nuclear weapons, North Korea threatened to turn Seoul into “a sea of fire,” setting off a panic in the South that prompted residents to rush to stock up on food.

But after a decade of political reconciliation with Pyongyang, South Koreans have grown less afraid of military threats from the North, and there was no sign of panic Sunday in Seoul.

The South’s Defense Ministry has said that Mr. Kim’s comment last week about possible attacks on the North should not be interpreted as an intention to launch a pre-emptive strike.

The North has conducted a nuclear test, but it is unclear whether the country has mastered the ability to deliver a working nuclear weapon.

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