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Park to hold security ministers' meeting amid N.K. threats

April 2, 2013 - 09:44 By 윤민식
South Korean President Park Geun-hye was to hold a meeting of Cabinet ministers related to foreign affairs and security on Tuesday amid North Korea's near-daily threats of war on the Korean Peninsula, an official said.

It will be Park's first such meeting since she took office in February.

The meeting will discuss the "situations at home and abroad," the official said without elaborating. Participants will include the chief of the national security office, the defense minister, the unification minister and the National Intelligence Agency chief, he said.

The first vice foreign minister will attend the meeting on behalf of the foreign minister who is on a trip to the United States.

In recent weeks, North Korea has sharply ratcheted up tensions with repeated war threats in anger over joint South Korea-U.S. military exercises as well as a new U.N. Security Council resolution adopted in response to its third nuclear test on Feb. 12.

Pyongyang voided the Korean War armistice and nonaggression pacts it signed with South Korea decades ago and cut off all cross-border hotlines before declaring that it was in "a state of war."

Despite the North's harsh rhetoric, analysts believe that chances of war breaking out on the peninsula are extremely low, because the communist regime in Pyongyang is well aware that any war would be suicidal.

Still, South Korea's military, supported by the U.S., remains on high alert with its top leaders vowing to sternly retaliate if attacked by the North.

During a defense ministry policy briefing on Monday, Park ordered the military to deal sternly with any North Korean provocations without "political considerations," saying she takes "very seriously" a recent string of North Korean moves and war threats.

The 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce, not a peace treaty, leaving the two Koreas still technically at war. About 28,500 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea to deter North Korean provocations. (Yonhap News)