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Lethal weapons

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The Pentagon may be about to reposition forces, including B-52 and B-1 bombers, as a bar to any North Korean military aggression amid rising tensions over that country's suspected nuclear weapons programme.

Ironically, a short-term build-up of forces in the region could come even as the Bush administration mulls a long-term reduction in the 'trip-wire' force of 37,000 US troops long maintained across the demilitarised zone in South Korea.

Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who last week denounced the North Korean government as 'terroristic', has put as many as 24 B-52 and B-1 bombers on alert for possible deployment to Guam along with surveillance aircraft, Pentagon officials said. Meanwhile, the US aircraft carrier Carl Vinson has been ordered to move towards the Korean peninsula to replace the Japan-based Kitty Hawk, the fifth carrier sent to within striking distance of Iraq.

In putting long-range bombers on alert, Mr Rumsfeld was aiming 'to make sure that North Korea doesn't do anything adventurous or dangerous of a military kind', Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said on February 6.

He said North Korean leader Kim Jong-il's government was 'unpredictable' and 'seems to be moving along a ladder of escalation' since the US confronted it over a covert uranium enrichment programme begun in breach of a 1994 non-proliferation deal with Washington. The North, no slouch at brinkmanship and taking a page from Mr Bush's own play-book, claimed it was entitled to launch a pre-emptive strike against US interests rather than wait until the Pentagon may have polished off President Saddam Hussein of Iraq.

The governing board of the UN's nuclear watchdog agency declared North Korea in breach of atomic safeguards on Wednesday, sending the crisis to the Security Council.

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