North Korea claims ‘pre-emptive’ right

1:04 p.m.

SEOUL — North Korea warned today that it has the right to take “pre-emptive” action in response to ongoing U.S.-South Korean military drills.

The North’s latest rhetorical salvo came after President Bush spoke yesterday with Chinese President Hu Jintao about how to persuade the North to return to deadlocked international talks on its nuclear weapons program.

The U.S. and South Korea began the annual joint military exercises yesterday, which the North had previously said would be considered a declaration of war.

Some 29,500 U.S. troops remain in South Korea as a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War that ended in a cease-fire that has never been replaced by a peace treaty.

The North’s military said today it “would not be bound to the [armistice agreement] in taking on its own initiative military measures for protecting the security and sovereignty of the country in the future. It called the exercises a “war action declaring the [armistice] null and void.”

The North Korean military “reserves the right to undertake a pre-emptive action for self-defense against the enemy at a crucial time it deems necessary to defend itself,” the North’s army outpost at the truce village of Panmunjom said in the statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

The U.S. military has said the exercises — mostly simulation-driven drills that run through Sept. 1 and include some 17,000 troops — are defensive in nature and not a provocation.

The North’s threats weren’t new but followed a report last week that cited U.S. officials as saying the country was making suspicious moves at a possible underground nuclear test site. South Korea’s Defense Ministry said Sunday it was dispatching personnel to a scientific institute to monitor seismic tremors that could indicate movement caused by a nuclear explosion.

In its statement today, the North also described the U.N. Security Council resolution adopted last month after it test-fired seven missiles as tantamount to a declaration of war that the U.S. pushed through “by wire-pulling its followers.”

Key North Korean allies China and Russia also signed off on the resolution, which bans U.N. member countries from missile-related dealings with the North.