NORTH KOREA's official media, citing "the danger of the outbreak of war at any moment", yesterday again urged the United States to sign a "temporary" bilateral peace treaty which would put South Korea on the sidelines.
"The danger of an outbreak of war at any moment is latent on the Korean peninsula, but there is no mechanism for security to prevent the war," the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.
The article, attributed to the party newspaper Rodong Sinmun, came a day after South Korea said the North had "provocatively" sent its navy patrol boats across the ill defined maritime border in the Yellow Sea.
Pyongyang claimed that the incident was instigated by a southern naval intrusion. But Asian and western diplomats here and in Beijing have long warned that the North would try to use sea rather than land to pressure the US into talks, without provoking an all out war.
North Korea has said it is studying a four way peace talks proposal put forward last month that would bring the two Koreas to the table with the US and China in a support role. But it still argues that it should talk only with Washington.
"If the peace problem is to be settled on the Korean peninsula, a peace mechanism should be provided," KCNA quoted the article as saying.
Arguing that the 1953 armistice agreement, which it has unilaterally repudiated, was now a piece of paper, it argued that "the [North's] proposal for concluding a tentative agreement with the US comes out from such a realistic requirement".
"We call for ensuring a complete, package and durable peace ... and to this end, consider that a peace agreement should be signed between [North Korea] and the US."
. Former US president Mr Jimmy Carter said in Tokyo yesterday that his private humanitarian organisation would send a fact finding mission to North Korea in June to investigate the extent of the food shortage there.
Mr Carter brokered an inter Korean summit when he visited Pyongyang last June at the height of a tense standoff over North Korea's suspected nuclear arms programme. But the summit failed to materialise as North Korean President Kim Il Sung died a month later.