Friday March 21, 1:51 PM US preparing strike on North Korea -- Pyongyang
North Korea has accused the United States of preparing a pre-emptive strike on its nuclear facilities to coincide with the war on Iraq.
The official Korean Central News Agency said large-scale joint US-South Korean war games had brought the peninsula to the brink of nuclear war.
It said the war games "timed to coincide with the US attack on Iraq" and their emphasis on air power demonstrated that the United States was preparing to launch a strike.
"This means that it (the US) is going to mount a pre-emptive attack on nuclear facilities in the DPRK (North Korea) and take it as an opportunity of escalating the war," the official news agency said in a dispatch monitored here.
The dispatch said Washington had "hurled unusually huge combat forces equipped with sophisticated weapons" into the annual war games with South Korea, including the US aircraft carrier Carl Vinson.
"They involve hundreds of thousands of troops and various types of modern combat hardware enough to wage a war," it said.
After failing to persuade North Korea to scrap its nuclear weapons drive, Washington intended to settle the crisis by military means and the war games were conceived to fix the "zero hour" for the attack, KCNA said.
North Korea vowed to repulse any attack, with the official news agency vowing that the army and people were "fully ready to wipe out the aggressors to the last man at a single stroke."