US defence chief: Threat from North Korea growing (Roundup)

Seoul - The danger posed by North Korea has grown as it develops its nuclear and missile programmes and engages in proliferation, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said Wednesday on a visit to South Korea. 'The peril posed by the North Korean regime remains and, in many ways, has become even more lethal and destabilizing,' Gates told South Korean and American soldiers in Seoul, according to the national Yonhap News Agency. The secretary said the capability of North Korea's ground forces had deteriorated, but the threat the country represents has grown because of its pursuit of nuclear weapons and its spread of nuclear and missile know-how to other regimes. 'Everything they make, they seem to be willing to sell,' Gates charged, adding that the United States would never accept nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula. He arrived Wednesday from a visit in Japan to take part in annual bilateral security talks. Gates is to meet Thursday with his South Korean counterpart, Kim Tae Young. On Wednesday, Lee Sang Eui, chairman of South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff, discussed with his US counterpart, Admiral Michael Mullen, ways to strengthen the security alliance, in which the United States has stationed 28,500 soldiers in the South as a deterrent to North Korea. The two allies fought together in the 1950-53 Korean War against the North. Both sides remain technically at war after an armistice, and not a peace treaty, ended that conflict. Tensions have continued with isolated, Stalinist North Korea ever since, most recently over its nuclear programme. The United States and the two Koreas are involved in talks with China, Japan and Russia aimed at ending Pyongyang's nuclear weapons programme. North Korea withdrew from the negotiations in April but has recently indicated it was willing to return to the negotiating table if the United States would engage in direct talks with it. It has also been involved in a cautious rapprochement with the South since the summer. In the latest development on that front, South Korea said Wednesday that it would deliver communications equipment worth 850 million won (720,000 dollars) to the North next week to modernize the telephone connection between their armed forces. The total cost of the upgrade was estimated at 2.1 billion to 2.7 billion won. 'We have come up against big difficulties in communicating because of the worn-out equipment,' Unification Ministry spokeswoman Lee Jong Joo said in Seoul. In the past month, it has led to 30 cases of miscommunication, she said. The existing line is used to exchange information about cross-border traffic.