Kim confident North Korean air force ‘can beat back the enemy’

NORTH KOREAN leader Kim Jong-il visited an air base just hours after Iraq’s leadership crumbled and told pilots he was confident they could “beat back the enemy,” the North’s media reported yesterday.

North Korean television showed photographs of Kim touring Flying Unit 887 on Thursday, a day after US-led forces unseated Saddam Hussein, whose country Washington has labelled part of an "axis of evil" with North Korea and Iran.

"Seeing the pilots fully ready to cope with the moves of the enemy for aggression, he noted with great satisfaction that they are always maintaining a high degree of revolutionary vigilance and fully prepared to courageously beat back the enemy any time if he comes in to attack," the official KCNA news agency said.

Pyongyang says it will be Washington's next target once the war in Iraq is over, something the United States denies.

Either way, foreign investors are jittery about the drawn-out crisis over North Korea's suspected nuclear arms ambitions.

"Virtually all possible outcomes even short of catastrophic war or large-scale military confrontation carry significant added security and economic risk," said Bank of America in a research report.

In the South's port of Ulsan, South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun attended the launching of the second of six planned radar-evading stealth destroyers able to carry out anti-ship and anti-submarine missions as well as eavesdropping.

In the US, North Korea's deputy ambassador to the United Nations gave the North's first reaction to Saddam's fall.

"The result of the Iraq war gives the DPRK a kind of determination and the will to take assured measures to defend its territory against possible US attacks," Radio Free Asia quoted Han Song-ryul as saying on Thursday at a seminar in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The radio station, which is funded by the US Congress but not government-run, said Han had also told the seminar that, if Washington accepted its call for bilateral talks on its suspected nuclear weapons programme, it could expect "many positive steps."

There are 37,000 US troops in South Korea alongside 690,000 South Korean military. North Korea has 1.1 million troops, many deployed near the Demilitarised Zone frontier that has bisected the peninsula since the 1950-1953 Korean War.

The US Central Intelligence Agency said in a report North Korea appeared last year to have the goal of building a plant to produce enough uranium for two or more nuclear weapons a year.

"Even if Pyongyang has nuclear development programmes, North Korea is a small country which cannot be a US competitor in terms of nuclear weapons," Han said.

"If the United States accepts our offer for direct talks, Washington can expect many positive steps from North Korea in resolving nuclear problems," the radio quoted Han as saying.