North Korea vowed today it would not buckle under pressure as the US threatened to impose sanctions and block missile shipments to force the communist state to abandon its nuclear arms programme.
US officials said last night that Washington would look to North Korea's neighbours and allies, and to the UN, to intensify pressure on Pyongyang.
The US military and its allies could block North Korean missile shipments as part of a broader effort to curb weapons proliferation and to deny cash-strapped Pyongyang revenues from its arm sales, they said.
One official called it a "tailored containment" strategy. "The imperialist reactionaries are seriously mistaken if they think they would bring the Korean people to their knees with pressure," Pyongyang's state-owned KCNA news agency said today, quoting an editorial in the official Rodong Sinmunnewspaper.
But the editorial added that the government was keen to settle the crisis in a peaceful way. It did not elaborate.
Yesterday, 10,000 people turned out in a state-sponsored protest in Pyongyang to denounce Washington over its hardline policy on the North's steps to revive a nuclear programme that might have already produced one or two atomic bombs.
North Korea has ordered inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to leave, the latest escalation of a crisis analysts say is aimed at goading Washington and its allies into giving food and energy aid for the starving nation of 22 million.
The US, keen to keep its focus on Iraq, told North Korea it wanted a peaceful end to the crisis on the world's last Cold War frontier, but would not negotiate under duress.