North Korea on Friday called for the withdrawal of US troops from South Korea, saying their prolonged presence could spawn an "all-out war". The US troops' presence has turned the Korean peninsula into "the world's biggest hotspot", the North's foreign ministry said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.
"If the US seeks to keep its forces in South Korea, contrary to the unanimous desire of the regional people, it had better get itself ready to taste an all-out war with (North Korea)," it said. Some 28,500 US troops are based in the South under a mutual defence pact, which was signed during the 1950-53 Korean War. The Koreas have been technically at war since the conflict ended in an armistice, without a subsequent peace treaty being signed.
The ministry described the US troop presence as "the most vivid expression of the US hostile policy" toward the nuclear-armed North. The US policy will only force the North to bolster its "nuclear deterrent, making the prospect for solving the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula gloomier", it said.
The North has been developing nuclear weapons for decades. Its official position has been that it needs them for self-defence against a US nuclear threat. Pyongyang disclosed in November 2010 an apparently operational uranium enrichment plant, in addition to its plutonium stockpile.