SEOUL/BEIJING (Reuters) – North Korea sent one of its top military officials as a “special envoy” from its leader Kim Jong-un to Beijing on Wednesday, accompanied by a high-powered delegation in what appeared to be a bid to mend frayed relations with its most important ally.

The delegation led by Choe Ryong-hae, vice chairman of the country’s top military body, was the most senior to visit China since Kim’s kingmaker uncle Jang Song-thaek made the trip in August 2012.

Ties between Pyongyang and Beijing have been hurt by the North’s third nuclear test, carried out in February, and by China agreeing to U.N. sanctions on the North and starting to put a squeeze on North Korean banks.

North Korean state news agency KCNA said China’s ambassador to Pyongyang, who is seen as the closest of all foreign envoys to Kim Jong-un, saw the delegation off at the airport.

Choe’s first meeting in Beijing was with Wang Jiarui, head of the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s International Department, China’s Xinhua news agency said, without providing details.

The diplomatic move by North Korea came after Japan reached out to Pyongyang last week by sending a special envoy to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to hold talks over Japanese citizens abducted by the isolated and impoverished state.

Choe is one of the tight coterie of officials around Kim Jong-un, who has been in power for just over a year after succeeding his father.

He is a long-time political administrator and was surprisingly made a vice marshal in the army last year despite having no military background.

Jang’s trip in 2012 had been aimed at securing a visit for Kim to Beijing and to win investment for the North’s shattered economy, although it appeared to have failed, according to diplomats. Jang is seen as the most powerful official in North Korea after Kim.

“It is an important visit as he (Choe) is both a high-ranked official and coming as a special envoy of Kim Jong-un, and there have been no high level contacts between the two countries for such a long time,” said Jin Canrong, associate dean of the School of International Studies at Renmin University in Beijing.

BEIJING LIKELY TO SEEK RETURN TO NUCLEAR TALKS

Jin, a specialist on China-North Korea relations, said Beijing would once again urge Pyongyang to return to the so-called “Six Party Talks” process, aimed at denuclearization.

The talks included the North, China, the United States, South Korea, Japan and Russia and have been stalled since 2009 when North Korea conducted its second nuclear test.

“The Chinese people have been angered by North Korea’s provocations. Certainly one of China’s demands will be for North Korea to stop doing this,” said Jin.

As well as staging the country’s third nuclear test, Kim Jong-un presided over the launch of two long range rockets. These are banned by the United Nations due to concerns Pyongyang is testing technology to use in a long-range nuclear missile.

North Korea is almost entirely reliant on China for imports of fuel and food and since it closed an industrial zone on the border with South Korea, has few other outlets for its exports.

The North has traditionally attempted to play China off against the United States and appeared to be open to the possibility of a deal with Japan that irked both Seoul and Washington when Abe’s aide visited Pyongyang last week.

Yoshihide Suga, Abe’s cabinet secretary, told a news conference on Wednesday that Japan aimed to resume talks with North Korea as part of attempts to resolve the abduction issue.

“Since we are probing all the possibilities, that is naturally included,” Suga said.

Japan and North Korea last held government talks in November 2012, before the North’s last long-range missile launch in December and nuclear test in February.

South Korea: North Korea on Tuesday threatened the United States and South Korea over joint naval drills taking place this week in tense Yellow Sea waters ahead of a Washington summit by the allies’ leaders.

In a highly conditional warning, the section of the Korean People’s Army responsible for operations in North Korea’s southwest said it will hit back if any shells fall in its territory during the drills, which began Monday and will end Friday. Should the allies respond to that, the statement said, Pyongyang’s military would then strike five South Korean islands that stand along the aquatic frontline between the countries.

The area includes waters that are claimed by both countries, and is the most likely scene of any future clash between the rival Koreas. North Korea disputes a boundary unilaterally drawn close to its shores by the U.S.-led U.N. Command after the war, and has had three bloody naval clashes with the South since 1999.

Highly critical language is standard from North Korea during what the allies call routine military drillsthat they stage over the course of a year. Tuesday’s statement was softer than the bellicose rhetoric Pyongyang unleashed with regularity during two months of larger-scale joint military drills by the allies that ended one week ago. That included threats of nuclear and missile strikes on Washington and Seoul.

Still, this new warning comes at a time of tentative diplomatic maneuvering on the divided Korean Peninsula, which is still technically in a state of war, as the three-year Korean War ended 60 years ago in an armistice, not a peace treaty.

The threat also came hours ahead of a summit by U.S. President Barack Obama and South Korea’s new president, Park Geun-hye. They hope to present a strong front against North Korea during their meeting Tuesday at the White House, but also want to leave the door open to talks with Pyongyang.

There are concerns that any skirmish or shelling between the Koreas could escalate into war. Two attacks blamed on Pyongyang in 2010 killed 50 South Koreans, and Park has repeatedly said Seoul would respond aggressively to another attack from the North.

If Pyongyang conducts an attack similar to the 2010 shelling of an island that killed four South Koreans, “We will make them pay,” Park told CBS in an interview aired Monday.

Inter-Korean relations are particularly strained amid North Korean anger over U.S.-South Korean military drills and U.N. sanctions in March that sought to punish the North over its February nuclear test, the country’s third.

Last week, South Korea pulled out its last remaining citizens from a joint factory park in North Korea after Pyongyang withdrew all of its 53,000 workers earlier. The park is the last symbol of inter-Korean rapprochement.

Despite the allies’ claims that the military drills are routine, Pyongyang calls them invasion preparation and is especially sensitive to the inclusion of any U.S. nuclear-capable assets. Washington in March responded to rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula by making the unusual announcements that it had sent nuclear capable B-52 and B-2 bombers to participate in the drills, prompting a harsh North Korean rhetorical response.

Nuclear-powered U.S. carriers routinely come to South Korea around this time of year as part of drills aimed at enhancing naval cooperation, South Korean Defense Ministry spokesman Kim Min-seok said Monday in a briefing. But Seoul wouldn’t discuss whether any U.S. nuclear capable assets were participating in this week’s drills, and U.S. military officials declined to comment on operations.

On Tuesday, Kim denied North Korea’s claim that South Korea’s military this week conducted live-fire artillery drills near the disputed Yellow Sea waters.

LONDON: A leading British university criticised the BBC on Sunday for arranging an academic trip to North Korea to make an undercover documentary, saying it had put students who were unaware of the plans in danger.

The London School of Economics (LSE) said three BBC journalists – including the respected reporterJohn Sweeney – joined a student society trip at the end of March, posing as tourists to make a film about the secretive state.

The university said the students had been told “a journalist” would accompany them, but it had not been made clear the BBC’s aim was to use the visit to record an undercover film for “Panorama”, a current affairs programme.

“This was not an official LSE trip,” Craig Calhoun, the Director of the LSE, wrote on Twitter. “Non-students & BBC organised it, used the society to recruit some students, & passed it off.”

Tensions on the Korean peninsula have escalated in recent weeks, with North Korea threatening nuclear war against the United States and South Korea.

Alex Peters-Day, general secretary of the LSE’s student union, told Sky News the students were only told of the BBC’s intentions to make an undercover film at a very late stage, with one saying she was only informed when they were on the plane to North Korea.

She said the BBC had used the students as “human shields”.

The university said Sweeney, who graduated from the LSE in 1980, had posed as a history PhD student at the university to gain entry to the country even though he currently had no connections with the institution.

“BBC staff have admitted that the group was deliberately misled to the involvement of the BBC in the visit,” the LSE said in an email to staff and students released to the media.

“It is the LSE’s view that the students were not given enough information to enable informed consent, yet were given enough to put them in serious danger if the subterfuge had been uncovered prior to their departure from North Korea.”

“STUDENTS WARNED”

It said the LSE’s chairman had asked the BBC to pull the documentary, which is due to be shown on Monday, but the broadcaster’s director-general had refused.

Sweeney admitted he had lied to the North Korean government agency that helped organise the visit, but defended the BBC’s actions.

“What the LSE has been doing is putting out stuff which is factually inaccurate in our view,” Sweeney told BBC TV. “They’re putting words into the students’ mouths. The majority of students support this programme.”

Ceri Thomas, the Head of BBC News Programmes, said the students had been told twice about the possible dangers of having a journalist on the trip, but were not informed about the broadcaster’s plans to make an undercover film because it would have put them in a worse position had the BBC team been found out.

“They had the information we think to make informed consent,” he told BBC TV. He said he could not categorically rule out students’ lives were put at risk but stated there was an “overwhelming” public interest in making the documentary.

PYONGYANG, North Korea: Despite North Korea’s warnings that the threat of war on the Korean Peninsula is so high it cannot guarantee the safety of foreign residents, it literally trotted out athletes from around the world on Sunday for a marathon through the streets of its capital — suggesting its concerns of an imminent military crisis might not be as dire as its official pronouncements proclaim.

As it prepares to celebrate its most important holiday of the year, the birthday of national founder Kim Il Sung on Monday, the mixed message — threats of a “thermonuclear war” while showcasing foreign athletes and even encouraging tourism — was particularly striking on Sunday.

Pyongyang crowds lined the streets to watch athletes from 16 nations compete in the 26th Mangyongdae Prize Marathon in the morning and then filled a performance hall for a gala concert featuring ethnic Korean performers brought in from China, Russia and Japan as part of a slew of a events culminating in Kim’s birthday — called the “Day of the Sun.”

After racing through the capital, the foreign athletes and hundreds of North Korean runners were cheered into Kim Il Sung Stadium by tens of thousands of North Korean spectators. North Korea’s official media said the marathon was larger than previous years and that enthusiasm was “high among local marathoners and their coaches as never before.”

“The feeling is like, I came last year already, the situation is the same,” said Taiwan’s Chang Chia-che, who finished 15th.

Showing off foreign athletes and performers as part of the birthday celebrations has a propaganda value that is part of Pyongyang’s motivation for highlighting the events to its public, even as it rattles its sabers to the outside world. In recent weeks, Pyongyang has said it could not vouch for the safety of foreigners, indicated embassies consider evacuation plans and urged foreigners residing in South Korea to get out as well.

But there does not appear to be much of a sense of crisis among the general population, either.

Pyongyang residents are mobilizing en masse for the events marking the birthday, rushing to tidy up streets, put new layers of paint on buildings and erect posters and banners hailing Kim, the grandfather of the country’s new dynastic leader, Kim Jong Un.

Pyongyang’s statements are commonly marked by alarming hyperbole and it has not ordered the small number of foreigners who are here to leave. Several embassies in Pyongyang refused to comment on the suggestion they consider evacuating, referring questions back to their home countries. But there were no reports that any diplomatic missions had actually left.

Even so, its warning has heightened concerns in a region struggling to assess how seriously to take North Korea’s recent torrent of angry rhetoric over ongoing U.S.-South Korea military maneuvers just across the border. Officials in South Korea, the United States and Japan say intelligence indicates that, fresh off a successful nuclear test in February, North Korea’s leaders are ready to launch a new medium-range missile.

North Korea has also taken the unusual move of suspending work at the Kaesong factory complex on its side of the Demilitarized Zone, a major source of foreign currency and one of the last remaining symbols of inter-Korean rapprochement.

On Sunday, it rejected South Korea’s proposal to resolve tensions through dialogue. It said it has no intension of talking with Seoul unless it abandons what it called the rival South’s confrontational posture.

Secretary of State John Kerry, in the region to coordinate the response with U.S. allies and China, warned North Korea not to conduct a missile test, saying it will be an act of provocation that “will raise people’s temperatures” and further isolate the country and its people.

Kerry was in Tokyo on Sunday after meeting with Chinese leaders in Beijing on Saturday. In Tokyo, Kerry and Japan’s foreign minister, Fumio Kishida, opened the door to direct talks with North Korea if certain conditions are met. Kerry said the U.S. was “prepared to reach out” to North Korea, but that Pyongyang must first lower tensions and honor previous agreements.

North Korea has issued no specific warnings to ships and aircraft that a missile test is imminent, and is also continuing efforts to increase tourism.

“We haven’t experienced any change,” said Andrea Lee, president and CEO of Uri Tours, which specializes in bringing tourists to North Korea. “They have been encouraging us to bring in more people.”

Lee said about 2,000-3,000 Western tourists visit North Korea each year and that the level is rising, though the recent tensions have sparked a significant number of cancellations. Air Koryo, North Korea’s flag-carrier, announced it is planning to add more regular passenger flights to and from Beijing, another sign that Pyongyang — while certainly not ready to throw open its doors — wants to make it easier for tourists to put North Korea on their travel itineraries.

“I never considered canceling,” said Sandra Cook, a retired economics professor from Piedmont, California, who planned her trip in November, before the tensions escalated. “I think it is a particularly interesting time to be here.”

With Lee as her guide, Cook and several other Americans and Canadians toured the North Korean side of the DMZ, Kaesong and a collective farm. She said that aside from the North Korean DMZ guides’ harsh portrayal of the “American imperialists'” role in the Korean War and on the peninsula today, she was surprised by the seeming calm and normalcy of what she has been allowed to see.

“The whole world is watching North Korea, and there we were yesterday peacefully strolling along the river in the sunshine. It’s surreal,” she said. “If you didn’t know about the tensions, you would never know it. You would think everything is fine. The place feels so ordinary.”

BEIJING: The United States said on Saturday that Chinahad agreed to help rid North Korea of its nuclear capability by peaceful means, but Beijing made no specific commitment in public to pressure its long-time ally to change its ways.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met China’s top leaders in a bid to persuade them to push reclusive North Korea, whose main diplomatic supporter is Beijing, to scale back its belligerence and, eventually, return to nuclear talks.

Visiting Beijing for the first time as secretary of state, Kerry has made no secret of his desire to see China take a more active stance towards North Korea, which in recent weeks has threatened nuclear war against the United States and South Korea.

Kerry and China’s top diplomat, State Councillor Yang Jiechi, said both countries supported the goal of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula.

“We are able, the United States and China, to underscore our joint commitment to the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula in a peaceful manner,” Kerry told reporters, sitting next to Yang at a state guesthouse in western Beijing.

But North Korea has repeatedly said it will not abandon nuclear weapons which it described on Friday as its “treasured” guarantor of security.

Yang said China’s stance on maintaining peace and stability on the peninsula was clear and consistent, repeating phrasing used by the Foreign Ministry since the crisis began.

“We maintain that the issue should be handled and resolved peacefully through dialogue and consultation. To properly address the Korea nuclear issue serves the common interests of all parties. It is also the shared responsibility of all parties,” he said, speaking through an interpreter.

“China will work with other relevant parties, including the United States, to play a constructive role in promoting the six-party talks and balanced implementation of the goals set out in the September 19 joint statement of 2005.”

The United States and its allies believe the North violated the 2005 aid-for-denuclearization deal by conducting a nuclear test in 2006 and pursuing a uranium enrichment program that would give it a second path to a nuclear weapon in addition to its plutonium-based program.

Six-party aid-for-disarmament talks, involving the two Koreas, the United States, Japan, Russia and host China, collapsed in 2008 when the North walked away from the deal.

Kerry declined to comment on what specifically China may do to push for a peaceful solution on North Korea, saying only that they had discussed all possibilities.

At a news conference in Seoul on Friday and in a U.S.-South Korean joint statement issued on Saturday, Kerry signaled the U.S. preference for diplomacy, but stressed North Korea must take “meaningful” steps on denuclearization.

“We don’t want to get into a threat for threat or … some kind of confrontational language here. There’s been enough of that,” Kerry said in Beijing.

If North Korea got rid of its nuclear capabilities, then the United States would have no reason to maintain recently deployed defensive capabilities – such as a missile defense system sent to Guam – he said.

“Now, obviously, if the threat disappears, i.e. North Korea denuclearizes, the same imperative does not exist at that point in time for us to have to have that kind of robust, forward leaning posture of defense.”

The Pentagon has in recent weeks responded to the North Korean threats by announcing plans to position two Aegis guided-missile destroyers in the western Pacific and a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system to Guam.

TOKYO: It’s easy to write off North Korea’s threats to strike the United States with a nuclear-tipped missile as bluster: It has never demonstrated the capability to deploy a missile that could reach the Pacific island of Guam, let alone the mainland U.S.

But what about Japan?

Though it remains a highly unlikely scenario, Japanese officials have long feared that if North Korea ever decides to play its nuclear card it has not only the means but several potential motives for launching an attack on Tokyo or major U.S. military installations on Japan’s main island. And while a conventional missile attack is far more likely, Tokyo is taking North Korea’s nuclear rhetoric seriously.

Amid reports North Korea is preparing a missile launch or anothernuclear test, Japan on Tuesday deployed PAC-3 missile interceptors in key locations around Tokyo. Japan has taken similar measures before, but has never actually tried to shoot down a North Korean missile and was not expected to try to do so unless there was a clear threat to Japanese territory.

Japan’s defense minister has also reportedly put destroyers with missile interception systems on alert in the Sea of Japan.

“We are doing all we can to protect the safety of our nation,” chief Cabinet spokesman Yoshihide Suga said Monday, though he and Ministry of Defense officials refused to confirm the reports about the naval alert, saying they do not want to “show their cards” to North Korea.

North Korea, meanwhile, issued a new threat against Japan.

“We once again warn Japan against blindly toeing the U.S. policy,” said an editorial Monday in the Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of its ruling party. “It will have to pay a dear price for its imprudent behavior.”

Following North Korea’s third nuclear test in February, Japanese experts have increasingly voiced concerns that North Korea may already be able to hit — or at least target — U.S. bases and major population centers with nuclear warheads loaded onto its medium-range Rodong missiles.

“The threat level has jumped” following the nuclear test, said Narushige Michishita, a former Ministry of Defense official and director of the Security and International Studies Program at Tokyo’s National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies.

Unlike North Korea’s still-under-construction intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, program, its arsenal of about 300 deployed Rodong missiles has been flight tested and is thought to have a range of about 1,300 kilometers (800 miles).

That is good enough to reach Tokyo and key U.S. military bases — including Yokota Air Base, which is the headquarters of the U.S. 5th Air Force; Yokosuka Naval Base, where the USS George Washington aircraft carrier and its battle group are home-based; and Misawa Air Base, a key launching point for U.S. F-16 fighters.

Michishita, in an analysis published late last year, said a Rodong missile launched from North Korea would reach Japan within five to 10 minutes and, if aimed at the center of Tokyo, would have a 50-percent probability of falling somewhere within the perimeter of Tokyo’s main subway system.

He said Japan would be a particularly tempting target because it is close enough to feasibly reach with a conventionally or nuclear-armed missile, and the persistent animosity and distrust dating back to Japan’s colonization of the Korean Peninsula in 1910 provides an ideological motive.

Also, a threat against Japan could be used to drive a wedge between Tokyo and Washington. North Korea could, for example, fire one or more Rodong missiles toward Tokyo but have them fall short to frighten Japan’s leaders into making concessions, stay out of a conflict on the peninsula or oppose moves by the U.S. forces in Japan to assist the South Koreans, lest Tokyo suffer a real attack.

“Given North Korea’s past adventurism, this scenario is within the range of its rational choices,” Michishita wrote.

Officials stress that simply having the ability to launch an attack does not mean it would be a success. They also say North Korea is not known to have actually deployed any nuclear-tipped missiles.

Tokyo and Washington have invested billions of dollars in what is probably the world’s most sophisticated ballistic missile defense shield since North Korea sent a long-range Taepodong missile over Japan’s main island in 1998. Japan now has its own land- and sea-based interceptors and began launching spy satellites after the “Taepodong shock” to keep its own tabs on military activities inside North Korea.

For the time being, most experts believe, North Korea cannot attack the United States with a nuclear warhead because it can’t yet fashion one light enough to mount atop a long-range ICBM. But Japanese analysts are not alone in believing North Korea has cleared the “miniaturization” problem for its medium-range weapons.

In April 2005, Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that North Korea had the capability to arm a missile with a nuclear device. In 2011, the same intelligence agency said North Korea “may now have” plutonium-based nuclear warheads that it can deliver by ballistic missiles, aircraft or “unconventional means.”

The Pentagon has since backtracked, saying it isn’t clear how small a nuclear warhead the North can produce.

SEOUL, South Korea: South Korea’s point man on North Korea said Monday there is an “indication” that Pyongyang is preparing for a fourth nuclear test, a day after another Seoul official said a Pyongyang missile test may be in the works.

Unification Minister Ryoo Kihl-jae told a parliamentary committee Monday that “there is such an indication” of nuclear test preparationsat Pyongyang’s site in the country’s northeast.

South Korean defense officials have said the North completed preparations for a nuclear test at two underground tunnels. The North used one tunnel for its last nuclear test Feb. 12. The second remains unused.

Either a nuclear test or a missile test would escalate tensions that have been rising for weeks on the Korean Peninsula, and would likely invite a new round of U.N. Security Council sanctions over North Korea’s nuclear and rocket activity. The U.S. and South Korea have been raising their defense posture, and foreign diplomats were considering a warning from Pyongyang that their safety in North Korea could not be guaranteed beginning Wednesday.

Ryoo made his comment about a nuclear test in answering a lawmaker’s question about whether there had been increased personnel and vehicle activities at the North’s nuclear test site.

After Ryoo spoke, a ministry official said Pyongyang has been ready to conduct a nuclear test any time it wants. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

North Korea has unleashed a flurry of war threats and provocations over U.N. sanctions for its last nuclear test, and over ongoing U.S.-South Korean military drills, which the allies say are routine but Pyongyang says is a preparation for a northward invasion.

North Korea’s warning to diplomats prompted South Korean President Park Geun-hye’s national security director to say that Pyongyang may be planning a missile launch or another provocation around Wednesday, according to presidential spokeswoman Kim Haing.

During a meeting with other South Korean officials, the official, Kim Jang-Soo, also said the notice to diplomats and other recent North Korean actions are an attempt to stoke security concerns and to force South Korea and the U.S. to offer a dialogue. Washington and Seoul want North Korea to resume the six-party nuclear talks — which also include China, Russia and Japan — that it abandoned in 2009.

The roughly two dozen countries with embassies in North Korea appeared to be staying put, for now at least.

Sweden, which looks after U.S. interests in North Korea because Washington and North Korea lack diplomatic relations, and Brazil have no plans to withdraw any diplomats from Pyongyang at this stage, according to their foreign ministries Sunday. Brazil said it is keeping a close eye on the situation but at this time see no reason to change the decision. There has been no advisory that staff at the Egyptian Embassy will leave or suspend their work.

The Pentagon has strengthened missile defenses and made other decisions to combat the potential threat, and postponed a missile test, scheduled for this week in California, to avoid raising tensions further. U.S. Gen. Martin Dempsey, the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, said Sunday that he doesn’t believe North Korea will engage in military action soon, “but I can’t take the chance that it won’t.”

Dempsey said the U.S. has been preparing for further provocations or action, “considering the risk that they may choose to do something” on one of two nationally important anniversaries — April 15, the birth of North Korean founder Kim Il Sung, and April 25, the creation of the North Korean army.

Tensions between Seoul and Pyongyang led South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to announce Sunday that its chairman had put off a visit to Washington. The U.S. military said its top commander in South Korea had also canceled a trip to Washington.

The South Korean defense minister said Thursday that North Korea had moved a missile with “considerable range” to its east coast, possibly to conduct a test launch. His description suggests that the missile could be the Musudan missile, capable of striking American bases in Guam with its estimated range of up to 4,000 kilometers (2,490 miles).

Amid North Korea’s threats and warnings, it has blocked South Korean workers and cargo from entering its Kaesong industrial complex, where South Korean companies have employed thousands of North Korean workers for the past decade.

North Korea is not forcing South Korean managers to leave the factory complex, and about 500 of them remained at Kaesong on Monday. But the entry ban at the park, the last remaining inter-Korean rapprochement project, is posing a serious challenge to many of the more than 120 South Korean firms there because they are running out of raw materials and are short on replacement workers. More than a dozen of the companies have stopped their operations in Kaesong.

A high-level North Korean official visited the industrial zone on Monday, the official Korean Central News Agency reported. It said that Kim Yang Gon, secretary of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, blamed South Korea for making it impossible to operate to zone as usual.

South Korea’s finance minister, Hyun Oh-seok, said Monday that it is “quite ridiculous” for North Korea to be closing the border at Kaesong. “North Korea has nothing to gain from this kind of things,” he said at a news briefing.

SEOUL/WASHINGTON: The United States said it would soon send a missile defense system to Guam to defend it from North Korea, as the U.S. military adjusts to what Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel called a “real and clear danger” from Pyongyang.

Hours later, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said North Korea had moved what appeared to be a mid-range Musudan missile to its east coast. It was not clear if the North planned to fire the rocket or was just putting it on display as a show of force, one South Korean government source was quoted as saying.

North Korea also barred entry to a joint industrial complex it shares with the South for a second day on Thursday and said it would shut the zone if Seoul continued to insult it.

Events on the Korean peninsula have begun to unnerve global financial markets long used to the rhetoric North Korea routinely hurls at Seoul and Washington.

“The assumption remains that this is more bluster …,” said Rob Ryan, a strategist with RBS in Singapore. “But from here, we’ve reached a level of tensions that say things can’t get too much worse without an actual exchange of fire.”

The broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan was down 0.6 percent, dragged down by a 2 percent slump in South Korean shares, while the South Korean won slid 0.7 percent against the U.S. dollar.

U.S. stocks sank on Wednesday after Hagel’s comments and the Guam deployment news.

North Korea also repeated its threat to launch a nuclear attack on the United States. Pyongyang said it had ratified a potential strike because of U.S. military deployments around the Korean peninsula that it claimed were a prelude to a possible nuclear attack on the North.

Washington had been informed of the potential attack by North Korea, a spokesman for its army said in a statement carried by the English-language service of state news agency KCNA. It was unclear how such a warning was given since North Korea does not have diplomatic ties with Washington.

The report from KCNA appeared to re-state many of the month-long fusillade of threats emanating from Pyongyang.

Experts say North Korea is years away from being able to hit the continental United States with a nuclear weapon, despite having worked for decades to achieve nuclear-arms capability.

North Korea has previously threatened a nuclear strike on the United States and missile attacks on its Pacific bases, including in Guam, a U.S. territory in the Pacific.

Those threats followed new U.N. sanctions imposed on the North after it carried out its third nuclear test in February.

“Some of the actions they’ve taken over the last few weeks present a real and clear danger,” Hagel told an audience at the National Defense University in Washington.

Despite the rhetoric, Pyongyang has not taken any military action and has shown no sign of preparing its 1.2 million-strong armed forces for war, the White House said on Monday.

That indicates its threats are partly intended for domestic consumption to bolster young leader Kim Jong-un ahead of celebrations marking the anniversary of the April 15 birthday of Kim Il-sung, the state’s founder and the younger Kim’s grandfather.

Caitlin Hayden, spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council, criticized the latest North Korean statement.

“It is yet another offering in a long line of provocative statements that only serve to further isolate North Korea from the rest of the international community and undermine its goal of economic development,” Hayden said.

HAGEL: TAKE THREATS SERIOUSLY

Hagel said he had to take the threats seriously, language he has used in recent weeks as the United States has revamped its missile defense plans and positioned two guided-missile destroyers in the western Pacific.

The United States has also flexed its muscles during annual military drills with South Korea, flying two radar-evading stealth bombers on a first-of-its-kind practice bombing run over South Korea.

In the latest move, the Pentagon said it was deploying a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system to Guam in the coming weeks. The THAAD system includes a truck-mounted launcher, interceptor missiles and an AN/TPY-2 tracking radar.

Last month, Hagel said the Pentagon would add 14 new anti-missile interceptors in Alaska and move ahead with the deployment of a second missile-defense radar in Japan.

Yonhap quoted multiple government sources privy to intelligence from U.S. and South Korean authorities as saying North Korea had moved what appeared to be a Musudan missile to its east coast.

The missile is believed to have a range of 3,000 km (1,865 miles) or more, which would put all of South Korea and Japan in range and possibly also Guam. North Korea is not believed to have tested the Musudan mid-range missiles, according to most independent experts

South Korea’s defense ministry declined to comment.

The missile was moved to the coast by train. The North has a missile launch site on its northeastern coast, which it has used to unsuccessfully test-fire long-range rockets in the past.

The Yonhap report did not say if the missile had been moved to the missile site.

The South Korean government said the North would allow 222 South Korean workers to leave the Kaesong industrial zone on Thursday. That would leave another 606 South Koreans in the complex. Seoul has urged its citizens to get out.

North Korea has threatened to shut the complex, one of the impoverished North’s few sources of ready cash.

The industrial park, just inside the border with North Korea, has not formally stopped operations since it was inaugurated in 2000. It houses 123 companies and employs 50,000 North Koreans making cheap goods such as clothing.

SEOUL, South Korea: North Korea vowed Tuesday to restart all mothballed facilities at its main Yongbyon nuclear complex, adding to tensions already raised by near daily warlike threats against the United States and South Korea.

The reactor was shut down in 2007 as part of international nuclear disarmament talks that have since stalled.

A spokesman for the General Department of Atomic Energy said that the facilities to be restarted are a graphite-moderated 5 megawatt reactor, which generates spent fuel rods laced with plutonium and is the core of the Yongbyon nuclear complex. The reactor, when fully running, is capable of churning out one atomic bomb worth of plutonium — the most common fuel in nuclear weapons — a year.

The move will boost fears in Washington and among its allies about North Korea’s push for nuclear-tipped missiles that can reach the United States, technology it is not currently believed to have.

Pyongyang conducted its third nuclear test in February, prompting U.N. sanctions that have infuriated its leaders and led to the current tensions. The country has since declared that making nuclear arms and a stronger economy are the nation’s top priorities.

North Korea added the 5-megawatt, graphite-moderated reactor to its nuclear complex in 1986 after seven years of construction. The country began building a 50-megawatt and a 200 megawatt reactor in 1984, but their construction was suspended under a 1994 nuclear deal with Washington.

North Korea has long said that the reactor operation is aimed at generating electricity. It takes about 8,000 fuel rods to run the reactor. Reprocessing the spent fuel rods after a year of reactor operation could yield about 7 kilograms of plutonium — enough to make at least one nuclear bomb, experts say.

SEOUL, South Korea: North Korea warned Seoul on Saturday that the Korean Peninsula was entering “a state of war” and threatened to shut down a border factory complex that’s the last major symbol of inter-Korean cooperation.

Analysts say a full-scale conflict is extremely unlikely, noting that the Korean Peninsula has remained in a technical state of war for 60 years. But the North’s continued threats toward Seoul and Washington, including a vow to launch a nuclear strike, have raised worries that a misjudgment between the sides could lead to a clash.

North Korea’s threats are seen as efforts to provoke the new government in Seoul, led by President Park Geun-hye, to change its policies toward Pyongyang, and to win diplomatic talks with Washington that could get it more aid. North Korea’s moves are also seen as ways to build domestic unity as young leader Kim Jong Un strengthens his military credentials.

On Thursday, U.S. military officials revealed that two B-2 stealth bombers dropped dummy munitions on an uninhabited South Korean island as part of annual defense drills that Pyongyang sees as rehearsals for invasion. Hours later, Kim ordered his generals to put rockets on standby and threatened to strike American targets if provoked.

North Korea said in a statement Saturday that it would deal with South Korea according to “wartime regulations” and would retaliate against any provocations by the United States and South Korea without notice.

“Now that the revolutionary armed forces of the DPRK have entered into an actual military action, the inter-Korean relations have naturally entered the state of war,” said the statement, which was carried by Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency, referring to the North’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Provocations “will not be limited to a local war, but develop into an all-out war, a nuclear war,” the statement said.

Hours after the statement, Pyongyang threatened to shut down the jointly run Kaesong industrial park, expressing anger over media reports suggesting the complex remained open because it was a source of hard currency for the impoverished North.

“If the puppet group seeks to tarnish the image of the DPRK even a bit, while speaking of the zone whose operation has been barely maintained, we will shut down the zone without mercy,” an identified spokesman for the North’s office controlling Kaesong said in comments carried by KCNA.

South Korea’s Unification Ministry responded by calling the North Korean threat “unhelpful” to the countries’ already frayed relations and vowed to ensure the safety of hundreds of South Korean managers who cross the border to their jobs in Kaesong. It did not elaborate.

South Korean Defense Ministry spokesman Kim Min-seok said the country’s military remains mindful of the possibility that increasing North Korean drills near the border could lead to an actual provocation.

“The series of North Korean threats — announcing all-out war, scrapping the cease-fire agreement and the non-aggression agreement between the South and the North, cutting the military hotline, entering into combat posture No. 1 and entering a ‘state of war’ — are unacceptable and harm the peace and stability of the Korean Peninsula,” Kim said.

“We are maintaining full military readiness in order to protect our people’s lives and security,” he told reporters Saturday.

Naval skirmishes in the disputed waters off the Korean coast have led to bloody battles several times over the years.

But on the streets of Seoul on Saturday, South Koreans said they were not worried about an attack from North Korea.

“From other countries’ point of view, it may seem like an extremely urgent situation,” said Kang Tae-hwan, a private tutor. “But South Koreans don’t seem to be that nervous because we’ve heard these threats from the North before.”

The Kaesong industrial park, which is run with North Korean labor and South Korean know-how, has been operating normally, despite Pyongyang shutting down a communications channel typically used to coordinate travel by South Korean workers to and from the park just across the border in North Korea. The rivals are now coordinating the travel indirectly, through an office at Kaesong that has outside lines to South Korea.

North Korea has previously made such threats about Kaesong without acting on them, and recent weeks have seen a torrent of bellicose rhetoric from Pyongyang. North Korea is angry about the South Korea-U.S. military drills and new U.N. sanctions over its nuclear test last month.

Dozens of South Korean firms run factories in the border town of Kaesong. Using North Korea’s cheap, efficient labor, the Kaesong complex produced $470 million worth of goods last year.