North Korea threatened military action Wednesday after South Korea joined a U.S.-led effort to limit the trafficking of weapons of mass destruction, the official Korean Central News Agency said.
South Korea said Monday that it was joining the 6-year-old Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) because of "the grave threat WMD and missile proliferation is posing to global peace," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Moon Tae-young.
The effort is aimed at halting shipments of weapons technology, a rare source of hard currency for North Korea, but Moon said the south would continue to uphold a shipping agreement with the North. "Our revolutionary armed forces ... will regard" South Korea's participation "in the PSI as a declaration of war ..." the North's official news agency said.
Pyongyang also announced it was no longer bound by the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War. "The Korean Peninsula is bound to immediately return to a state of war from a legal point of view, and so our revolutionary armed forces will go over to corresponding military actions," North Korea said through its news agency.
Since its April rocket launch, Pyongyang has considered almost any opposition a "declaration of war," including U.N. Security Council sanctions and participation in the Proliferation Security Initiative.
Source: CNN
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