SEOUL, South Korea — With the diplomatic ball in its court, North Korea stuck Wednesday to its long-held game plan of firing off bombastic rhetoric while pretending to ignore mounting international pressure to end its nuclear weapons programs.
Hours after the Bush administration shifted tactics Tuesday and formally agreed to talk with North Korea, the isolated communist country’s official news agency released a vitriolic condemnation of the United States without acknowledging what South Korea’s media heralded as a potential breakthrough in the standoff.
“The ‘nuclear issue’ that renders the situation on the Korean peninsula strained is a product of the U.S. strategy to dominate the world whereby it is working hard to bring a holocaust of a nuclear war to the Korean nation, calling for a pre-emptive nuclear strike after deploying lots of nuclear weapons in and around South Korea,” said a commentary from the North Korean news agency.

— Michael Dorgan, Knight

Ridder Newspapers (KRT)