SOUTH Korea's new president has promised a strong military response to any North Korean provocation after Pyongyang announced the two countries are now in a state of war.
President Park Geun-Hye's warning came as North Korea's rubber-stamp parliament formalised the country's status as a nuclear weapons state and appointed a sacked economic reformer for a fresh term as prime minister.
It also coincided with a US announcement that it had deployed stealth fighters to South Korea as part of an ongoing joint military exercise.
At a meeting with senior military officials and Defence Minister Kim Kwan-Jin, Park said she took the nearly daily stream of bellicose threats emanating from the North over the past month "very seriously".
"I believe that we should make a strong and immediate retaliation without any other political considerations if (the North) stages any provocation against our people," she said.
Her defence minister made it clear that the South would carry out pre-emptive strikes against the North's nuclear and missile facilities in the event of hostilities breaking out.
"We will ... establish a so-called 'active deterrence' aimed at neutralising the North's nuclear and missile threats quickly," Kim said.
The US military said on Monday it had deployed F-22 Raptor stealth fighters to South Korea as part of the ongoing Foal Eagle military exercise.
"The F-22s are advanced fighter aircraft and they're an important display of our commitment to the South Korean alliance," Pentagon spokesman George Little told reporters in Washington.
North Korea has already threatened to strike the US mainland and US bases in the Pacific in response to the participation of nuclear-capable US B-52 and B-2 stealth bombers in the exercise.
Monday's gathering of the North's Supreme People's Assembly, or parliament, was notable for the promotion of a former prime minister who was sacked in a reported backlash against his pursuit of economic reforms.
Pak Pong-Ju, 74, was unanimously returned to the post of prime minister, which he had previously held from 2003-2007, when he spearheaded modest economic reforms of state enterprises.
An apparent backlash from the party and the military saw him suspended from duty in June 2006 and sacked the following year.
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