New US sanctions against North Korea will violate a UN statement issued after the sinking of a South Korean warship, Pyongyang has said.
It added that the US and South Korea's plans to hold joint military exercises posed a major danger to the region.
The new sanctions were announced by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during a visit to South Korea.
Mrs Clinton has now arrived in the Vietnamese capital, Hanoi, to attend a regional meeting of foreign ministers.
Tensions between the two Koreas were raised in March, when the South Korean warship the Cheonan was sunk with the loss of 46 lives.
A multinational investigation team found the ship had been torpedoed by North Korea - a conclusion that Pyongyang rejects.
North Korean official Ri Tong-il, a member of Pyongyang's delegation at a regional security forum in Hanoi, said the US decision to impose new sanctions - announced on Wednesday - violated a statement from the UN about the sinking that was issued earlier this month.
The UN statement held back from directly blaming North Korea, but condemned the sinking as a threat to regional security.
Ri Tong-il said: "The decision to hold military drills is a major danger for the security of the region"
He also criticised the US-South Korean joint military exercises in the region.
The first manoeuvres, in the Sea of Japan (East Sea) for four days from Sunday, will involve the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington and 20 other ships and submarines, as well as 100 aircraft and 8,000 personnel. Later exercises will take place in the Yellow Sea.
China has objected to any foreign military operations in the Yellow Sea, which is on the western side of the Korean Peninsula. On Wednesday, China expressed "deep concern" over the plans, which the US says are purely defensive in nature.
New sanctionsSpeaking in South Korea on Wednesday, Mrs Clinton said the new US sanctions would target Pyongyang's sale and purchase of arms and import of luxury goods, and would help prevent nuclear proliferation.
She said the measures would increase Washington's ability to "prevent North Korea's proliferation, to halt their illicit activities that help fund their weapons programmes, and to discourage further provocative actions".
The sanctions were not directed at the North Korean people but at the "misguided and malign priorities of their government", she said.
The sanctions were not directed at the North Korean people but at the "misguided and malign priorities of their government", she said.
Mrs Clinton said she expected North Korea to "take certain steps that would acknowledge their responsibility" for the incident and to move towards denuclearisation.
"They know very well that they made commitments over the last years to the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula which they have reneged on and which we expect them to once again adhere to," she told reporters.
"We are looking for irreversible denuclearisation."
The announcement came after Mrs Clinton and US Defence Secretary Robert Gates visited the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea, in a show of support for Seoul following the sinking of the Cheonan in March.
North and South Korea technically remain at war because their three-year conflict ended in an armistice in 1953 and no peace treaty was signed. The US has since stationed thousands of troops in South Korea.
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