The warning came as the United States, Japan and Australia, began cracking down on the North Korean trade in illicit drugs, weapons and counterfeit money -- believed to be key sources of hard currency for Pyongyang to buttress its regime and its suspected nuclear weapons programs.

North Korea's main state-run newspaper Rodong Sinmun on Tuesday charged that the United States is "laying an international siege to the North and putting a blockade against it as a premeditated scheme to start a new war on the Korean peninsula."