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Asia jittery as UN takes on DPRK nuclear crisis

Pyongyang warns Tokyo it is within striking distance

AFP, Seoul
The United Nations intervenes for the first time Wednesday in the nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula, prompting warnings of war from North Korea and concern that the world body could make a dangerous situation even worse.
The 15-member UN Security Council convenes in New York for a meeting that represents a victory for US efforts to cast the deepening crisis as a challenge to the entire world community but leaves North Korea's Asian neighbours jittery about how the unpredictable regime will react.
In the run-up to the meeting, North Korea said it would not recognize any resolution to be adopted at Security Council deliberations which it referred to as a "prelude to war."
Though all five permanent members of the UN Security Council oppose North Korea's suspected nuclear weapons drive, the unity ends there.
Divisions within the council indicate that Washington may be on collision course with Moscow and Beijing and no consensus is likely to emerge soon on a statement condemning North Korea's recent unilateral withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Santions are even less likely.
Pyongyang insists that it would view
any sanctions statement as an outright "declaration of war."
China and Russia oppose a UN role and South Korea and Japan view Security Council intervention with trepidation while the European Union has also expressed reservations.
In Beijing, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said Security Council talks were inappropriate and said no action should be taken to escalate the crisis.
Last month China's ambassador to the United Nations in Vienna Zhang Yan cautioned that pressure and sanctions "may exacerbate the confrontation."
In Moscow, Alexander Losyukov, the foreign ministry's curator of Asian affairs, said urgent measures were needed to cool off the situation.
"Otherwise, the UN Security Council discussion could, instead, become a launching pad for a further unraveling of relations," Losyukov said.
The United States has been pressing the United Nations to take up North Korea since October, when Washington said Pyongyang had admitted pursuing nuclear weapons despite a 1994 accord to freeze its nuclear program.
Since October, North Korea has expelled UN nuclear inspectors, restarted its mothballed nuclear reactor at Yongbyon that can produce weapons
grade plutonium, withdrawn from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and test-launched missiles.
And the war in Iraq has only served to complicate the situation.
North Korea, which was included along with Iraq and Iran in President George W. Bush's "axis of evil," maintains that it will be the next target of American military action.
In a rare statement on Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency from a senior military official, Kim Yong Chun, chief of the general staff of the (North) Korean People's Army, said his country was in the process of being transformed into one massive fortification.
Meanwhile, North Korea on Wednesday warned Japan to remember it was "within striking distance" of the Stalinist state amid heightened calls in Tokyo to contain the Pyongyang regime.
The North's official Korean Central News Agency accused Japan of being emboldened by the US-led invasion of Iraq, which it condemned as "state-sponsored terrorism," in its ambition to remilitarize.
"Japan should behave with discretion, clearly mindful that it is also within the striking range of the DPRK (North Korea)," KCNA said in a dispatch monitored here.