The sabre-rattling statement from the Defence Minister, Kim Il Chol, came as the last UN monitoring equipment was removed from the country’s frozen nuclear facilities in defiance of strong American warnings.

On Tuesday North Korea removed all the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) seals and disabled surveillance cameras at the nuclear complex at Yongbyon, 56 miles north of Pyongyang, which was sealed under the 1994 Agreed Framework with the US. The site includes a five-megawatt reactor, 8,000 spent fuel rods in a cooling pond and a radioactive reprocessing laboratory.

North Korea said it was unfreezing the facilities because it desperately needed nuclear power to meet its energy crisis. But the reactivation of the Yongbyon complex could produce weapons-grade plutonium within four months, enough to make at least three nuclear bombs.

“All the officers and men of the KPA (Korean People’s Army) should . . . prepare themselves to be human bombs and fighters ready to blow up themselves in order to defend the headquarters of the revolution,” the minister said in a statement marking President Kim Jong Il’s eleventh anniversary as the country’s top military commander.

The statement, read to a meeting of Communist Party and military officials on Tuesday and reported by the official Korean Central News Agency, accused the US of driving the situation on the Korean Peninsula to the brink of a nuclear war and said that the communist country was ready to hit back.

“If they . . . dare provoke a nuclear war, the army and people of the DPRK (North Korea) led by Kim Jong Il, the invincible commander, will rise up to mete out determined and merciless punishment to the US imperialist aggressors with the might of single-hearted unity more powerful than the A-bomb. The US hawks are arrogant enough to groundlessly claim that the DPRK has pushed ahead with a ‘nuclear programme’, bringing its hostile policy toward the DPRK to an extremely dangerous phase.”

The IAEA said last night that fresh fuel had been added to the five-megawatt reactor but that no work was being done at the reprocessing plant, which produces plutonium.

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