SEOUL, Aug. 10 (Yonhap) -- Just a day after North Korea fired artillery shells into its waters near the border with South Korea, the communist state threatened Tuesday to use its nuclear deterrent to show "what a real war is like" if such action is necessary.
The Rodong Sinmun, the newspaper of the North's ruling Workers' Party, however, stressed in an editorial that the only way to defuse military tensions between Pyongyang and Seoul is to "create a peaceful atmosphere."
North Korea "will clearly show to those buoyed by war fever what a real war is like any time it deems necessary through a war of retaliation of its own style based on its nuclear deterrent," the paper said.
"The most urgent issue on the Korean Peninsula, where a touch-and-go situation prevails, is to create a peaceful atmosphere," it said in the editorial carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.
North Korea has threatened "powerful physical retaliation" against South Korea's large-scale anti-submarine exercises that ended Monday near their western sea border. Forty-six South Korean sailors died in the area in March when their corvette sank in what Seoul says was a torpedo attack by a North Korean submarine.
The two Koreas remain technically at war after their 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce rather than a peace treaty. Further complicating their relations that have soured in recent years, a North Korean patrol boat on Sunday towed a South Korean fishing boat into a port on the east coast, prompting Seoul to urge the prompt release of the crew.
samkim@yna.co.kr
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