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North Korea on Thursday said the deployment of 15 US F-117 Stealth bombers to
South Korea was part of preparations for a preemptive nuclear strike on the country.
The deployment announced by Washington last week was an unpardonable act, said
the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland, a state organization
in charge of Korean affairs.
"We... bitterly denounce the deployment of Stealth fighter bombers in
South Korea by the United States as a... provocation of a war against the North
and the worst malicious challenge to the Korean nation," the committee
said in a statement.
It was Pyongyang's first official reaction to the deployment, which Washington
described as "routine training".
"This proves that the US scheme of preemptive nuclear attack is systematically
going over from violent words to operational plan and from the plan to the stage
of military action," the committee said.
The deployment was also Washington's way of trying to spoil the atmosphere
for an inter-Korean festival in Pyongyang on June 14-17 to celebrate the fifth
anniversary of a watershed inter-Korean summit on June 15, 2000, it said.
"This is an unpardonable provocation tantamount to turning a gun mouth
to the reunification fete of the Korean nation celebrating the fifth anniversary
of the historical June 15 joint declaration," the statement said.
The United States and North Korea remain locked in a tense standoff over Pyongyang's
nuclear weapons programme.
North Korea has boycotted China-hosted nuclear disarmament talks - which also
include the United States, South Korea, Japan and Russia - since June last year.
In February the regime declared it had built nuclear weapons and vowed to increase
its nuclear arsenals.
