US denounces N. Korea’s artillery attack

The United States Tuesday denounced North Korea's artillery attack on a South Korean island near the western sea border that killed two soldiers and injured dozens of others, Yonhap News Agency reported in a dispatch from Washington.

"The United States strongly condemns this attack and calls on North Korea to halt its belligerent action and to fully abide by the terms of the Armistice Agreement," Robert Gibbs, White House spokesman, said in a statement. "The United States is firmly committed to the defense of our ally, the Republic of Korea, and to the maintenance of regional peace and stability."

North Korea fired more than 100 artillery rounds on Yeonpyeong Island and nearby waters, where the South Korean navy was conducting a drill near the disputed maritime border in the Yellow Sea.

The attack comes amid heightened tensions on the Korean Peninsula since North Korea's torpedoing of a South Korean warship, which killed 46 sailors in the Yellow Sea in March, and its most recent disclosure of a uranium enrichment plant, which could produce material for nuclear warheads.

North Korea early this month showed American nuclear scientists and experts what it claimed were a 100-megawatt light-water reactor and a uranium enrichment facility with possibly 2,000 centrifuges.

Pyongyang said they were for generating power, but the facilities are believed to be linked to the communist state's long-suspected program to produce highly enriched uranium for bombs.

U.S. President Barack Obama will soon converse with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak over the phone to discuss the artillery shelling, White House officials said, adding Obama was awakened by National Security Adviser Tom Donilon at around 4 a.m. and briefed by aides at the Oval Office on the incident before he left for Indiana to visit a Chrysler auto plant.

Speaking to reporters, Bill Burton, White House deputy press secretary, said, "The president is outraged by these actions. We'll be working with South Korea and the international community in coming days on the best way forward in securing peace and stability in the region."

The spokesman dismissed the shelling and the revelation of the uranium program as part of the North's traditional brinkmanship.

"North Korea has a pattern of doing things that are provocative," Burton said. "What North Korea needs to do is live up to their international obligations and make real progress in ending their illegal nuclear program."

Stephen Bosworth, special representative for North Korea policy, who visited Beijing earlier in the day on the third and last leg of a tour that included Tokyo and Seoul, said he met with Chinese officials and discussed the shelling as well as the uranium project.

"The subject did, of course, come up in my meetings with the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and I think we both share the view that such conflict is very undesirable," he told reporters in Beijing. "I expressed to them the desire that restraint be exercised on all sides, and I think we agree on that."

Bosworth said that he and Chinese officials reconfirmed the need to resolve the North Korean nuclear issue through the six-party talks, involving the two Koreas, the U.S., China, Japan and Russia.