N. Korea Defiant on ’94 Arms Pledge

North Korea, angered by a Pentagon study naming the communist state as a potential target for nuclear strikes, threatened Wednesday to abandon a 1994 promise to freeze its nuclear research.

The accord with Washington is a linchpin of U.S. efforts to stop the Stalinist country from developing atomic bombs.

However, “under the present situation where nuclear lunatics have taken office in the White House, we are compelled to examine all the agreements with the U.S.,” North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

North Korea also accused Washington of planning to launch a nuclear war on the Korean peninsula.

“A nuclear war to be imposed by the U.S. nuclear fanatics upon the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea would mean their ruin in nuclear disaster,” the agency, using the formal name of North Korea, warned in a separate statement.

The remarks were North Korea’s first reaction to reports last week that the Pentagon was studying the possible use of nuclear weapons against seven countries that could threaten the United States: North Korea, China, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Russia and Syria.

“In case the U.S. plan . . . turns out to be true, the DPRK will have no option but to take a substantial countermeasure against it, not bound to any DPRK-U.S. agreement,” the Foreign Ministry said.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee Tuesday that no country was being targeted from day to day. He said reduction of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpiles would continue.