SEOUL: North Korea said Thursday it will not hold talks with Seoul under the current diplomatic situation, calling South Korean officials "ignorant and incompetent" a day after the hermit state abruptly cancelled planned inter-Korean discussions.
A high-level meeting between the two neighbours had been scheduled for Wednesday, but the North pulled out early that morning over joint military exercises between the US and the South.
The two-week "Max Thunder" drills started on May 11 and involve some 100 aircraft from the two allies, including F-22 stealth fighter jets.
"Unless the serious situation which led to the suspension of the north-south high-level talks is settled, it will never be easy to sit face-to-face again with the present regime of South Korea," the official KCNA news agency cited top negotiator Ri Son Gwon as saying on Thursday.
Pyongyang has even threatened to cancel a historic summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore next month, following weeks of tentative rapprochement.
Ri, head of the North's Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Country, described the South's reaction to the meeting's cancellation as a "confrontation racket", according to KCNA.
"On this opportunity the present South Korean authorities have been clearly proven to be an ignorant and incompetent group devoid of the elementary sense of the present situation," he added.
In Wednesday's angrily worded statement, KCNA denounced the Max Thunder exercises as a "rude and wicked provocation", and Seoul said it had received a message cancelling planned high-level talks "indefinitely".
The Pentagon said on Thursday there was no discussion of scaling back future military exercises between the United States and South Korea, which have provoked the ire of North Korea ahead of a planned U.S.-North Korean summit.
Asked whether there was any consideration of scaling back future drills to bolster the prospects for negotiations, Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White told a news briefing: "There has been no discussion of that."
US Defence Secretary Jim "Mad Dog" Mattis is likely to visit Japan in late June for talks with his Japanese counterpart Itsunori Onodera on North Korea, sources close to bilateral ties said Thursday.
During the talks, which will follow the first-ever US-North Korea summit on June 12, the defence chiefs are expected to reaffirm the two countries' commitment to continuing to apply pressure on North Korea until its complete denuclearisation, the sources said.
The language used in the two Pyongyang outbursts is a sudden and dramatic return to the rhetoric of the past from Pyongyang, which has long argued that it needs nuclear weapons to defend itself against the US.
Hostilities in the 1950-53 Korean War stopped with a ceasefire, leaving the two halves of the peninsula divided by the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and still technically at war.
At a dramatic summit last month in Panmunjom, the truce village in the DMZ, Kim and the South's President Moon Jae-in pledged to pursue a peace treaty to formally end the conflict, and reaffirmed their commitment to denuclearising the Korean peninsula.
But the phrase is open to interpretation on both sides and the North has spent decades developing its atomic arsenal, culminating last year in its sixth nuclear test -- by far its biggest to date -- and the launch of missiles capable of reaching the US.