SEOUL: North Korea’s communist regime has warned of a nuclear war on the Korean peninsula while vowing to step up its atomic bomb-making programme in defiance of new UN sanctions.

The North’s defiance presents a growing diplomatic headache for President Barack Obama as he prepares for talks on Tuesday with his South Korean counterpart on the North’s missile and nuclear programmes. South Korean President Lee Myung-bak told security-related

ministers during an unscheduled meeting today to “resolutely and squarely” cope with the North’s latest threat, his office said. Lee is to leave for the US on Monday morning.

A commentary today in the North’s main state-run Rodong Sinmun newspaper, carried by the official Korean Central News Agency, claimed the US

has 1,000 nuclear weapons in South Korea. Another commentary published Saturday in the state-run Tongil Sinbo weekly claimed the US has been deploying a vast amount of nuclear weapons in South Korea and Japan.

North Korea “is completely within the range of US nuclear attack and the Korean peninsula is becoming an area where the chances of a nuclear war are the highest in the world,” the Tongil Sinbo commentary said.

Kim Yong-kyu, a spokesman for the US military command in Seoul, called the latest accusation “baseless,” saying Washington has no nuclear

bombs in South Korea. US tactical nuclear weapons were removed from South Korea in 1991 as part of arms reductions following the Cold War.

South Korea’s Unification Ministry issued a statement today demanding the North stop stoking tension, abandon its nuclear weapons and return to dialogue with the South.

On Saturday, North Korea’s Foreign Ministry threatened war on any country that dared to stop its ships on the high seas under the new sanctions approved by the UN Security Council on Friday as punishment for the North’s latest nuclear test.

It is not clear if the statements are simply rhetorical. Still, they are a huge setback for international attempts to rein in North Korea’s nuclear ambitions following its second nuclear test on May 25. It first tested a nuclear device in 2006.