SEOUL, South Korea?North Korea, angered by a Pentagon study naming the communist state as a potential target for nuclear strikes, threatened Wednesday to abandon a 1994 promise to freeze its nuclear laboratories.

The 7-year-old accord with Washington is a linchpin of U.S. efforts to prevent the country from developing atomic bombs.

North Korea also accused Washington of planning to launch a nuclear war on the Korean peninsula and warned that it has the ability to retaliate.

“A nuclear war to be imposed by the U.S. nuclear fanatics upon the Democratic People’s Republic of [North] Korea would mean their ruin in nuclear disaster,” the country warned in a separate statement earlier Wednesday.

The remarks were North Korea’s first reaction to reports that the Pentagon was studying the possible use of nuclear weapons against seven countries that could threaten the United States, including North Korea.