North Korea has condemned Mr George W. Bush's speech calling on Pyongyang to halt its nuclear weapons programme as an "undisguised declaration of aggression" aimed at overthrowing the communist state.
Mr Bush, who last year branded North Korea part of an "axis of evil" along with Iraq and Iran, used this year's key policy address on Tuesday to accuse North Korea of cheating on its previous non-nuclear pledges and blackmailing the world with a new attempt to build atomic weapons.
The attack on Mr Bush and his State of the Union address was followed today by an appeal from the North Korean envoy in China for international pressure on Washington to enter direct talks with Pyongyang over the three-month-old nuclear impasse.
"If there are some countries concerned about the solution of the nuclear issue in the Korean peninsula, they should urge the United States to come to the negotiations with us without any preconditions," Ambassador Choe Jin-su said in Beijing.
Mr Choe repeated Pyongyang's previous demand for talks with the United States and recited a scathing overnight North Korean Foreign Ministry statement on Mr Bush.