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An effigy of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is put on a mock North Korean missile during an anti-North Korea rally denouncing North's plan to launch a long-range rocket in Seoul, Tuesday, March 20, 2012.Lee Jin-man/AP

In a deliberate display likely to enrage North Korea's reclusive and repressive regime, U.S. President Barack Obama will tour in the Demilitarized Zone – the planet's last Cold War flashpoint – Sunday before a nuclear-security summit in Seoul.

Already Pyongyang's neo-Stalinist regime is warning of war if the 50-nation summit so much as considers North Korea's suspected efforts to tip ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads.

"Any provocative act such as the issuance of a so-called statement concerning 'the North's nuclear issue' at the Seoul conference … would be considered a declaration of war against us," the state-run Korea Central News Agency warned.

Threats are flying in both directions.

The Obama administration – which only weeks ago was hailing the Feb. 29 supposed breakthrough on the nuclear issue with North Korea's new, youthful leader Kim Jong-un – is now threatening to halt food shipments over Pyongyang's plan to loft a satellite into space in mid-April.

Food aid is separately needed by North Korea's millions of malnourished but Washington contends free food remains contingent on Pyongyang keeping its promises not to spend billions on ballistic-missile and nuclear-weapons programs.

North Korea claims its space gambit is peaceful, aimed at commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Great Leader's birth, a reference to Kim Il-sung, grandfather of the current dictator, who made his own DMZ visit earlier this year.

Not persuaded that the launch is anything other that a ballistic-missile test, typical of the decades-long track record of promise-and-renege by Pyongyang over its clandestine nuclear-weapons program, the Obama administration is warning of new sanctions. U.S. analysts believe North Korea has yet to master the miniaturization of nuclear warheads needed to tip a ballistic missile but may be less than five years away from a combination that could reach the U.S. mainland.

North Korea, still technically at war with the United States and South Korea, won't attend the nuclear summit in modern, booming Seoul, which lies within range of tens of thousands of artillery cannons massed just beyond the DMZ. In the nearly 60 years since the 1953 ceasefire suspended the war between North and South, occasional flare-ups stymied dreams of reunifying the peninsula.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper will join dozens of leaders attending but the focus will be on whether Mr. Obama can marshal other great powers – notably China – to take a tougher line both with North Korea and, perhaps more importantly, Iran.

Mr. Obama will consult with the presidents of China, South Korea and Russia "about what we can do to help ensure that North Korea doesn't make the wrong choice in the first instance with regard to a long-range missile launch," Daniel Russel, the White House National Security Council director for Asia said in a pre-summit briefing.

The trip, he added, reflects two of Mr. Obama's highest foreign-policy priorities: staunching nuclear proliferation and pivoting to focus on Asia. "This is the third trip to South Korea by President Obama in the span of three years in office," he noted. Some supposedly close allies have hosted Mr. Obama only once. Others, like Israel, have yet to be visited by the President.

As for the visit to the DMZ, Mr. Russel called the zone "the front line of democracy in the Korean peninsula and a symbol of U.S. unity with military ally South Korea." But North Korea's still-crude nuclear weapons – twice tested in underground blasts – also underscore a failure of U.S. policy through successive presidents. Just as Mr. Obama now vows that he will prevent Iran from ever getting nuclear weapons– by military force is necessary – so previous presidents made exactly the same sort of threats against Pyongyang.

Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both, at various times, slapped sanctions, agreed deals and threatened dire consequences to prevent North Korea from building nuclear warheads. In the end, Pyongyang defied Washington and joined the small circle of nuclear-armed nations.

Mr. Obama's DMZ visit won't help defuse tensions on the peninsula, although it will be regarded by some South Koreans as a welcome show of support, coming almost two years to the day since a South Korean warship was torpedoed and sunk by a North Korean submarine. More than 28,000 U.S. troops – a force larger than the entire Canadian army – remains deployed to South Korea, backed by scores of warplanes.

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