It did not give a date for the launch, but said it would mark a great step forward for the communist state.

Correspondents say the statement is Pyongyang’s clearest reference yet to what neighbours believe may be the imminent test of a long-range missile.

When it tested the Taepodong-1 missile in 1998, it claimed to have put a satellite in orbit.

In July 2006 it test-fired the three-stage long-range Taepodong-2, but the missile blew up shortly after launch.

North Korea’s move comes amid heightened tensions with South Korea, and with Pyongyang pushing for a top spot on the agenda of the new US administration.

Alaska reach

The announcement came in a statement from the national space agency, carried by the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

“Full-scale preparations are under way to launch a rocket Unha-2 to put communication satellite Kwangmyongsong-2 into orbit,” it said.

“When this satellite is successfully launched, our space technology will make a great step forward toward becoming an economically strong country.”

The launch is planned from a base in Hwadae in the northeast of the country, the statement said.

Satellite images showed activity at the site, but there was no missile on the launch pad, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported, citing an intelligence official.

The base in Hwadae, called Musudan-ri, was where North Korea test-fired its long-range Taepodong-2 in 2006.

There are fears that the missile, with a theoretical range of 6,700 km (4,200 miles), could be used to target the US state of Alaska.

But when the missile was last tested, it exploded within a minute.

North Korea’s move comes with talks on an aid-for-disarmament deal – involving the US, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea – currently stalled.

Relations between the two Koreas are also tense following South President Lee Myung-bak’s decision to link the provision on bilateral aid to progress on denuclearisation. Pyongyang has recently scrapped several peace agreements with Seoul.

The mooted launch also follows speculation about the health of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, who is believed to have suffered a stroke in mid-2008.

On a trip to Asia last week, the new US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned North Korea against any rash moves, saying a test-launch would be “unhelpful”.

North Korea tested a nuclear weapon in October 2006. But experts say it does not yet have the technology to make a nuclear warhead small enough to mount on a missile.

North Korea ‘plans rocket launch

The unusually strong warning comes as North Korea steps up its war rhetoric in anger over South Korean President Lee Myung-bak’s tough stance toward the North.

The North Korean military has said it is “fully ready” for war with the South, and state-run media have warned that clashes between the two sides could break out at any time.

A lawmaker asked Defense Minister Lee Sang-hee how the South Korean military would react if the North fires artillery or missiles at its ships.

“When an enemy missile flies in, while we will take preventive measures, the point of missile launch should be attacked,” Lee Sang-hee responded, according to the Yonhap news agency.

Lee said the military would respond to any provocation but brushed off concerns that a counterattack could lead to a bigger battle.

“The military will give as much response as the enemy provoked in the shortest possible time so that it won’t develop into a full-scale war,” he said.

Choi Jin-hwan, an aide to lawmaker Rep. Hong Jung-wook, confirmed the exchange.

Lee’s comments were unusually strong. It is rare for South Korean officials to openly talk about attacking the North.

The maritime border off the peninsula’s west coast has been the scene of two deadly naval skirmishes, in 1999 and 2002, and is considered the most likely site for an armed clash if tensions continue to rise.

North Korea does not recognize the boundary, drawn by the United Nations at the end of the 1950-53 Korean War, and says the line should be redrawn further south.

Also Friday, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il named top military officer and key aide Gen. O Kuk Ryol, 78, to the No. 2 post at the powerful National Defense Commission, the North’s official Korean Central News Agency reported.

Kim replaced his defense minister and another top military official last week, KCNA said.

All three newly named officials are trusted hard-liners, said analyst Yang Moo-jin of the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul. He said the appointments suggest Kim is tightening his control over the military.

Since taking office a year ago, South Korean President Lee has stopped unconditional aid to the North until it abides by a pledge to dismantle its nuclear program.

SKorea to retaliate if NKorea attacks

But a large number of South Koreans who work at a joint industrial enclave in the North Korean border city of Kaesong were being allowed to keep permits to enter the factory park there, despite an earlier vow by Pyongyang to expel many of them by December 1, officials said.

“Today is the last day of Kaesong tours, and today is the last day of the train runs,” Unification Ministry spokesman Kim Ho-nyeon told a briefing in Seoul.

The border restrictions and the expulsion from the industrial park come about a week before regional powers are expected to meet in Beijing to resume talks on ending the North’s nuclear arms program and compensate it with economic and energy aid.

The last train run of a sole empty cargo car powered by an electric locomotive pulled out of the seldom-used Munsan station for the final run to Kaesong 40 minutes behind schedule.

Train services between the two Koreas were halted during the 1950-53 Korean War. The start of the regular freight train run last year was hailed as a milestone in reconciliation for the two states which, in the absence of a peace treaty, are technically still at war.

But the trains have mostly been empty because it is cheaper for companies at the Kaesong factory park to move goods by trucks. North Korea said in January this year it wanted to halt the service that runs along a 20-km (12-mile) stretch of track.

Analysts said the tours to the city of Kaesong, started about a year ago, might have been viewed by reclusive North Korea as destabilizing because they allowed visitors from the South to see just how destitute their neighbor is and gave its residents a glimpse of their wealthy southern neighbors.

While the border was being shut to trains and tours, as many as 1,700 people have been told they can keep their permits to enter the Kaesong factory zone, spokesman Kim said.

But the first of the approximately 1,000 people, including government officials, began pulling out on Friday and some expressed disappointment that their role was cut short.

“I wish South-North ties would improve as early as possible so that we can return to do our jobs,” Kim Chang-soo, with the joint management office, said as he crossed the border.

The factory park has provided cash-starved North Korea with hundreds of millions of dollars and is expected to be operating near normally on Monday, despite the border clampdown.

“There were always concerns North Korea would use economic projects … as political leverage,” said Dong Yong-sueng, a research fellow at Samsung Economic Research Institute.

He said the real damage to North Korea is that South Korean firms would now hesitate to invest there.

The two Koreas were in talks about allowing even more of the 4,200 pass holders to cross the border regularly, Kim said.

The Kaesong factory park, about 70 km (45 miles) from Seoul, is the only major economic connection between the two Koreas. A total of 88 South Korean firms employ more than 33,000 low-wage North Koreans there to make goods such as watches and clothes.

Reuters

Activists said the latest batch of 100,000 plastic-covered leaflets was carried across the heavily-fortified border by unmanned helium balloons on Thursday.

They said the leaflets carried messages criticising the government of Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader, and calling on North Koreans to rise up against him.

The South Korean government has urged the activists to stop sending the leaflets, saying they risk damaging already frayed relations with the North.

The leaflet drops are thought to have been a factor behind North Korea’s announcement last week that it would close the frontier between North and South from December 1.

The announcement came after North Korean military officials protested to their South Korean counterparts over the leaflets.

South Korean officials have previously said there is nothing they can do to stop the activists, citing freedom of speech.

However, earlier this week officials at the South Korean unification ministry said they were looking at any possible legal avenues through which they could enforce a ban on the airdrops.

Al Jazeera English

Despite the 1950-53 Korean War that killed millions and decades of animosity, there was little dispute between a South Korean group that visited Pyongyang last week and their North Korean hosts, as they agreed Japan’s colonial rule still casts a shadow over the peninsula.

The two Koreas have been split since Japan’s defeat in World War Two ended its 1910-1945 colonial rule. The united Korea under Japan’s emperor was then replaced with two states — the South under the U.S. sphere of influence and the North under the Soviet.

“The international community is in the midst of change and a number of countries are reflecting on their past inhumane crimes and aggression,” said Lee Hae-hak, a Christian pastor and a former democracy activist who headed the South Korean group.

“Only Japan is going in reverse,” Lee, who alsohonors South Korean group fighting against Japan’s Yasukuni war shrine seen by Asian neighbors as a symbol of its militarism because it honors convicted war criminals, told the Pyongyang seminar.

North Korea’s official media and several leading politicians in South Korea seldom miss the chance to criticize Japan for failing to pay what they see as proper contrition for its colonial rule that included forced labor, front-line brothels and attempts to end the Korean language.

And both agree that Japan should relinquish its territorial claims to a set of desolate islands called Dokdo in Korean and Takeshima in Japanese that lie about halfway between the two.

Japan, for its part, said it has paid proper reparations to the South, issued an apology for its aggression and lived in peace since World War Two ended. It has no diplomatic relations with Pyongyang and said they will not likely be coming until the North settles the issue of Japanese nationals it has kidnapped.

The head of a North Korean academy of historical studies, Ho Jong-ho, told the 90-minute seminar that Japan was running “reckless in its scheming against the North.”

Ties between the two Koreas, officially, have been at their lowest point in years. Impoverished Pyongyang has been angry at President Lee Myung-bak, who took office in February, for stopping the free flow of unconditional aid it had seen under his liberal predecessors for 10 years.

Last week, the communist North vowed to close the handful of cross-border links with the South beginning December 1 in a move seen as retreating deeper into its shell amid growing speculation over the health of its reclusive leader Kim Jong-il, thought to have suffered a stroke in August. Ordinary North Koreans only vaguely know of the dispute and about the islands.

But when it came to the need to protect them from the evil colonial hands of Japan, no one was in dispute.

“You should hand them over to us,” a North Korean official said, not entirely jokingly. “We’ll look after them real good.”

International | Reuters

Relations between the two Koreas, which fought a devastating war in 1950-53 and remain divided by the world’s most heavily fortified border, reached a new low this week with North Korea’s military announcing it will halt border crossings Dec. 1.

The ban could force dozens of South Korean factories operating at an industrial park in the North to shut down — a symbolic rejection of South Korean efforts since 2000 to foster reconciliation through commerce.

South Korea’s government said it urged the North not to stop development of the lucrative industrial zone.

But President Lee Myung-bak has not done what North Korea wants: reaffirm joint agreements made by the previous, liberal South Korean administration — including one prohibiting propaganda.

South Korean activists continue to send leaflets critical of North Korea across the border in huge balloons, much to the North Korean military’s anger. The North calls it a violation of a 2004 pact the two countries signed prohibiting propaganda; Lee’s government says the activists are protected by freedom of speech.

“The Lee group wants neither dialogue nor reunification. What they want is to deliberately deteriorate the north-south relations, perpetuate the division of the country and stand in (a) showdown with fellow countrymen,” the North Korean newspaper Minju Joson, considered a government mouthpiece, said in commentary Friday.

Former President Kim Dae-jung, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to nurture relations with the North, warned that the two Koreas stand on the cusp of reconciliation — or catastrophe.

“The South-North relations are now standing at a crossroads — either racing toward a collapse or reconciliation,” he told the newspaper Hankook Ilbo in an interview published Friday. “I’m deeply worried about the situation.”

The North Korean military announced Wednesday it will “restrict and cut off” traffic through the Demilitarized Zone dividing the two Koreas — the culmination of a series of warnings in recent weeks.

A week ago, a high-level North Korean military delegation paid a visit to the joint business park in Kaesong, with an official telling South Korean business managers to move out, according to a report in the Chosun Ilbo newspaper.

“The North Korean military is making a statement,” Koh Yu-hwan, a North Korea expert at Seoul’s Dongguk University, said Friday. “First they sent a warning; now they have to act so they will be taken seriously,” he said, calling it characteristic of North Korean strategy.

South Korean companies began setting up factories in Kaesong in 2004 at a time of warming relations between the two Koreas.

But ties have soured since Lee, a conservative the Minju Joson has described as “despicable human scum,” took office in February, pledging to get tough with the North.

Ties deteriorated further in July when a North Korean soldier fatally shot a South Korean tourist visiting Diamond Mountain, another joint project in the North. Seoul since has banned tours to the popular resort.

The Kaesong complex, where South Korean factories employ some 35,000 North Koreans, has been a key source of currency for the impoverished North. There are no signs anyone is preparing to leave, one manager said Friday.

“There is no trouble running our factory here and the atmosphere is OK,” Kim Hyun-woo, a South Korean manager at cookware maker Sonoko Cuisine Ware, told The Associated Press by telephone.

Yahoo! News

The North’s military said it would use a “more powerful and advanced” strike of its own if South Korea launches a pre-emptive strike.

“The puppet authorities (Seoul) had better bear in mind that the advanced pre-emptive strike of our own style will reduce everything… to debris, not just setting them on fire,” it said in a statement carried by the state news agency, KCNA.

“It will turn out to be a just war… to build an independent reunified state on it.”

The North’s military described its pre-emptive capability as “beyond imagination, relying on striking means more powerful than a nuclear weapon.”

The 1.1 million-strong military has for years deployed hundreds of conventional missiles targeting the South.

Relations between the two nations have been frosty for months.

But the latest warning, in unusually strong language, was in response to the actions of South Korean activists and defectors, who have launched balloons carrying tens of thousands of leaflets across the heavily fortified border.

On Monday, activists launched more than 40,000 leaflets from a boat near the eastern sea border.

These urged North Koreans to rise up against leader Kim Jong-Il , whom they described as a “murderous” dictator, and repeated claims that he suffers from paralysis following a stroke in mid-August.

Kim’s health is an especially sensitive subject in the hardline communist state, which gives its citizens only official information.

Pyongyang has complained before about South Korean reports that Kim suffered a stroke for which he needed brain surgery.

Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso said Tuesday in Tokyo that Kim is likely in hospital but is still capable of making decisions.

The military warned it would take “resolute practical action” if the South pursues a “confrontational racket” by spreading leaflets and conducting a smear campaign “with sheer fabrications.”

It did not elaborate on the action. At military talks Monday the North repeated threats to evict South Koreans from the Kaesong joint industrial complex unless Seoul stops the cross-border leaflets.

Tuesday’s statement rejected Seoul’s arguments that it cannot stop such actions in a democracy. It said the leaflet launches were masterminded by the South’s spy agency.

The statement also warned of a “total severance” of relations unless the conservative South Korean government respects summit accords reached with previous liberal Seoul governments in 2000 and 2007.

“The warning is not empty words because the North’s military will never tolerate slandering its leader,” Koh Yu-Hwan, a Dongkuk University professor, told AFP.

“North Korea may take strong military action or a limited military clash is always possible,” he said.

The North’s government newspaper Minju Josun said last week that the launch of leaflets could spark accidental border clashes which could develop into a full-scale military confrontation.

North Korea has already cut almost all official contacts with Seoul since President Lee Myung-Bak took office in February and adopted a tougher stance on cross-border ties.

After their first summit in 2000, the two nations agreed to halt government-level propaganda, a feature of the Cold War era.

But Seoul-based private groups have continued their leaflet drops, despite pleas from the South Korean government and from factory operators in Kaesong to stop the practice.

The two Koreas have remained technically at war since the 1950-53 conflict on the peninsula ended only in an armistice.

Yahoo! News

The talks were held despite a threat about 10 days ago from impoverished North Korea to cut off all ties with the South, a major supplier of aid and cash, in anger at the hardline policies of its president, whom it brands a U.S. sycophant.

“North Korea pointed out that more leaflets have been sent recently and called on the South to find ways to stop this,” South Korea’s Defence Ministry said in a statement.

South Korean groups have been sending the leaflets for years.

Analysts said the recent wave appears to have touched a nerve because they mention a taboo subject in the North — the health of leader Kim Jong-il, who was thought to have suffered a stroke in August.

The leaflets, printed in water-proof ink on plastic sheets, carried the names of South Korean civilians and prisoners of war believed to be held in the North, and a family tree that supposedly maps Kim’s relationships with the several women who bore his children, the groups said.

In their first direct talks with the South since conservative President Lee Myung-bak took office in February, North Korea said earlier this month the leaflets violated a deal reached between the two states, whose 1950-53 war was halted by a ceasefire.

Lee’s government has asked anti-North Korea civic groups to refrain from sending the leaflets but that did not stop two groups from sending skyward a batch that contained anti-Kim messages affixed with U.S. dollars and Chinese yuan.

“North Korea is blaming us for the frayed ties between the two Koreas, but that’s hogwash,” said Park Sang-hak, who defected from the North and helped lead the leaflet launch. Park said he has no plans to stop the airborne message campaign.

U.S. and South Korean officials said Kim may have fallen seriously ill in August, raising questions about leadership in Asia’s only communist dynasty and also about who was making decisions about its nuclear weapons ambitions.

The North’s official cabinet newspaper said last week the leaflets were “getting on the nerves of the army and people of the DPRK (North Korea),” and could lead to a nuclear war.

Lee angered North Korea by cutting off what once had been a steady stream of unconditional aid and by saying Seoul would tie its handouts to progress the North makes in ending its nuclear weapons programme.

In the Monday meeting, North Korea also wanted to improve hotlines set up along one of the world’s most militarised borders aimed at preventing hostilities from escalating into fighting. (Additional reporting by Jack Kim and Kim Junghyun; Editing by Paul Tait)

Reuters AlertNet – Two Koreas hold talks, anti-North leaflets dropped