North Korea said US reluctance to engage in face-to-face talks about its nuclear ambitions may make a clash inevitable on the world's last Cold War flashpoint. The North test-fired a missile Monday that rattled nerves in South Korea.

And as the United States prepared for a possible invasion of Iraq, Washington protested to Pyongyang Monday over a March 2 incident in which North Korean fighter jets intercepted a US spy plane.

Speaking to the graduating class of the Korea Military Academy a day after North Korea fired a cruise missile into the Sea of Japan, Roh said the redeployment plan was not new. But he stressed the half-century alliance between Seoul and Washington was more important than ever.

"The staunch Korea-US combined defense arrangement is greatly contributing to our national security. The solid (South Korea-US) alliance should be maintained even more so," he declared. "There can be no change whatsoever in that principle."

Roh's comments came after US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week troops could be pulled back from near the border with North Korea or withdrawn from South Korea altogether.

The United States has 37,000 troops in the South and act as a "trip wire" to deter North Koreans.

The remarks were an about-face from Roh's rhetoric during his presidential campaign late last year, when he called for a more balanced alliance and suggested Seoul could mediate in any conflict between North Korea and the United States.

Calls for a withdrawal of US forces mounted in South Korea last year in the campaign after two teen-age girls were killed in a traffic accident during US military exercises in June.

Technically at War

However, an older generation of people who remember the trauma of the 1950-53 Korean War, have voiced concern over a possible reduction in US forces in South Korea.

North Korea has about 10,000 artillery pieces and much of its 1.1 million-strong army arrayed along the sealed border with the South, less than an hour's drive north of Seoul.

The United States said on Tuesday it was sending up to six radar-avoiding F-117A "stealth" warplanes to South Korea for exercises this month with Seoul's forces. Military officials said the first such deployment of such planes to Kunsan Air Base in a decade was routine and not connected with the crisis over North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

But the move follows recent deployment of 24 American B-1 and B-52 bombers to the island of Guam in an open warning to Pyongyang against adventurism in case of a war with Iraq.

Tensions that have escalated for months over North Korea's suspected nuclear weapons program intensified on Monday after the latest missile test that follows another on the eve of Roh's Feb. 25 inauguration.

Political analysts say this is Pyongyang's way of putting pressure on Washington to engage in direct talks and it has been underscoring that demand with military moves that seem to parallel the US timetable for war with Iraq.

The Bush administration insists North Korea's nuclear program is a regional problem that must be settled through multilateral diplomacy.

But North Korea again poured scorn on that position.

"This is not the stand and attitude to solve the problem but an act of evading its responsibility," said Rodong Sinmun, a North Korean daily newspaper.

The newspaper said increasing US pressure on the North "would only make a clash unavoidable." The Demilitarized Zone bisecting the peninsula is the world's most fortified border.

The North's KCNA news agency said it was "quite possible" to find a solution through direct, sincere talks, but later switched tone in a report on annual US-South Korean military exercises, including a river crossing near the DMZ.

"The military drill clearly shows that their war moves to invade the North with large-scale forces and murderous equipment at all costs are entering a stage of real war," it said.

(China Daily March 12, 2003)