Seoul - North Korea warned Wednesday that it would conduct another nuclear test if the United Nations Security Council refused to apologize for criticizing the Stalinist state's April 5 rocket launch. "Unless the UN Security Council offers an apology immediately, we will be forced to take additional self-defence measures to protect the highest interests of our republic," a Foreign Ministry spokesman said in a statement cited by the state-run Korean Central News Agency.

Those measures would include nuclear and ballistic missile tests, it said.

After the Security Council condemned North Korea's rocket launch, which Western powers said was a cover-up for testing a long-range ballistic missile, Pyongyang quit international talks to end its nuclear weapons programme and announced it had restarted reprocessing nuclear fuel to obtain plutonium for nuclear arms.(dpa)