"It is also a dangerous act of bringing the disaster of a nuclear war to the Korean Peninsula," Rodong said in a dispatch carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency.

South Korea said last month it would send a team to "observe" a US-led Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) drill off Australia in April and that it would get briefed regularly on the initiative.

But Seoul says it has yet to join the politically-sensitive initiative, which Pyongyang believes aims largely to blockade North Korea, at a time of burgeoning inter-Korean rapprochement.

North Korea is locked in a standoff with the United States and its allies over Pyongyang's nuclear programme.

The PSI -- a US-led drive to improve global efforts to intercept nuclear, chemical and biological weapons shipments by rogue states and terrorist groups -- was launched in May 2003.

It has since held joint manoeuvres involving ships and maritime patrol aircraft with over 60 nations signing up for the initiative.

The key signatories include the United States, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia and Singapore.

China, a North Korean ally, and South Korea, which has sought closer ties with the North since a peace summit in 2000, have yet to join the initiative.

Minju Joson, the North's government-published newspaper, also warned Saturday that Seoul's joining the drill would "bar the inter-Korean relations from favorably developing and entail ... a nuclear war to the Korean Peninsula."

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