North Korea to end peace pacts with South

North Korea has announced that it is cancelling a hotline and a nonaggression pact with South Korea while reiterated past threats in anger over a UN Security Council vote to impose more sanctions on the country for its third nuclear test.
A statement the North issued on Friday said the country would retaliate with “crushing strikes” if enemies intruded into its territory. It also said that North Korea was voiding past inter-Korean nuclear disarmament statements.
North Korea previously said it was cancelling a hotline with the US and the armistice that closed the Korean War in 1953. Thursday’s Security Council resolution will tighten financial restrictions on North Korea and crack down on its attempts to ship and receive banned cargo in breach of UN sanctions.
The US-drafted statement, which was approved unanimously by the 15-nation council, was the product of three weeks of negotiations between the US and China after North Korea’s February 12 nuclear test.
Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general who is a former South Korean foreign minister, welcomed the council’s move, saying in a statement that the resolution “sent an unequivocal message to [North Korea] that the international community will not tolerate its pursuit of nuclear weapons”.
The UN vote came just hours after North Korea threatened to use its right to a pre-emptive nuclear attack against its aggressors. North Korea has accused the US of using military drills in South Korea as a launch pad for a nuclear war and has scrapped the armistice with Washington that ended hostilities in the 1950-53 Korean War.
“Now that the US is set to light a fuse for a nuclear war, revolutionary armed forces… will exercise the right to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to destroy the strongholds of the aggressors,” a foreign ministry spokesman said in a statement carried by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
The US said on Thursday it was “fully capable” of defending itself against any North Korean ballistic missile strike. Jay Carney, White House spokesman, said the US military could deal with any such attack and repeated earlier warnings that North Korea would gain nothing by threats and provocations.