N. Korea slams Park for speech on nuclear weapons

North Korea lashed out at South Korean President Park Geun-hye Thursday for being ignorant about its nuclear program and called her "a faithful servant and stooge" of the United States.

The North's denouncement was in response to Park's speech made earlier in the week at a global nuclear summit in The Hague, during which she called for ending North Korea's nuclear program as the first step toward realizing a nuclear-free world.

She also expressed concerns that Pyongyang's nuclear material could end up in the hands of terrorists and that a possible fire in the North's main nuclear complex in Yongbyon, north of the capital Pyongyang, could lead to a disaster worse than the 1986 Chernobyl accident.

The North's Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea accused Park of making provocative remarks over the North's nuclear issue at the third Nuclear Security Summit, which brought together global leaders to discuss ways to prevent nuclear terrorism.

"Though she is a faithful servant and stooge of the U.S., she should have wagged her tongue on the basis of hard facts and elementary common sense," an unidentified spokesman of the committee said in comments carried by the country's official Korean Central News Agency.

The spokesman said the great irony was that she asserted that building a world without nuclear weapons should start from the North's dismantlement of its nuclear programs.

"This either betrayed the lack of her knowledge about where to start or where to end and revealed that she had the same ulterior motive as the U.S.," the spokesman said, without elaborating on what he meant by "ulterior motive."

It is not unusual for the North to denounce leaders of South Korea and its key ally the U.S.

Last year, Pyongyang made a sexist swipe at Park by criticizing her "venomous swish of skirt," which it said made South Korean officials engage in warmongering against the North.

In 2009, North Korea's foreign ministry described then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as "a primary school girl" and "a pensioner going shopping" in response to her criticism of Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program.

The committee spokesman also claimed that Park's comments "crudely violated" a recent inter-Korean deal on halting smear campaign against each other.

Last month, the rival Koreas agreed to halt cross-border slander during their first high-level talks in seven years.

He also ruled out North Korea's any unilateral denuclearization under any circumstance.

"She had better not even dream about it," the spokesman said.

The North has shown no signs of giving up its nuclear programs as it views them as a deterrent against what it claims is Washington's hostile policy against it. (Yonhap)