Seoul, South Korea ? North Korea accused the United States Friday of triggering a nuclear crisis by failing to provide promised energy, disrupting inter-Korean reconciliation and plotting war against the North.

At the same time, Pyongyang reiterated that the only way to resolve the nuclear standoff on the Korean Peninsula was through direct talks with the United States. Washington says ties can only improve if North Korea first abandons its nuclear ambitions.

“The situation is getting tenser with each passing day,” the North said in a dispatch on its state-run news agency, KCNA. “The U.S. is entirely to blame for this.”

Pyongyang said Washington had failed to follow through on a pledge to build two nuclear reactors in North Korea in exchange for the freezing of its nuclear facilities in a 1994 deal. Those facilities, which the energy-starved North is in the process of reactivating, are the center of its suspected weapons program.

In Seoul, South Korea’s new government declared itself “in hot water” over the crisis with North Korea. It also confirmed U.S. intelligence reports that North Korea has reactivated a 5-megawatt nuclear reactor that could be used to make the raw material for nuclear weapons.

The reactivation followed a North Korean missile launch into the Sea of Japan and was apparently timed to coincide with Tuesday’s shift to a new South Korean government led by President Roh Moo-hyun.

“Indeed, the new government is in hot water from the beginning,” South Korea’s Unification Minister Jeong Se-hyun said Friday on KBS Radio.

Jeong, who directs the South’s policy of trying to engage the North, said Pyongyang’s recent maneuvers also appeared aimed at forcing the United States into direct dialogue to sign a nonaggression treaty with the isolated communist regime.