BEIJING, Feb. 4 (UPI) -- North Korea aimed more threats at the United States on Wednesday, as talks between South Korea and China on began on the North's nuclear capabilities.
Seoul's chief delegate to six-party talks involving South Korea, North Korea, China, the United States, Japan and Russia, attended the talks in Beijing. The talks were stopped in 2008, when Pyongyang abandoned the negotiations and embarked on a more focused program of building nuclear weapons and delivery capabilities.
North Korea called for a resumption of the talks after its 2013 nuclear test, but Seoul and Washington have questioned North Korea's commitment to abandon its nuclear weapons policy. The Beijing talks come after representatives of South Korea, Japan and the United States met last week in Tokyo.
Although a rush of activity to restart the talks is evident, North Korea rejected any indication it would return to the bargaining table, citing a step-up of U.S. sanctions and fresh joint military drills involving South Korea and the United States. In typically overheated language reported by the state-run Korean Central News Agency, Pyongyang accused the United States, which it called "gangster-like U.S. imperialists," of "inching closer to the stage of igniting a war of aggression."
"It [North Korea] will fight it [the United States] by conventional forces of its style. If the former unleashes a nuclear war against the latter, it will counter it through its own nuclear strikes, and if the former tries to bring down the latter through a cyber-warfare, it will react to it with its own pre-eminent cyber warfare and will thus bring earlier the final ruin of the U.S."
