The United States is trying to bring about the collapse of North Korea by increasing radio broadcasts to it and smuggling in transistor radios but its attempts will fail, a North Korean newspaper said on Sunday. US President George W. Bush vowed in his inaugural address on Thursday to help oppressed people fight tyranny. He did not name any country but Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice earlier said North Korea was among the world's "outposts of tyranny".
"The US is foolishly attempting to disintegrate and degenerate the interior of the DPRK so as to ... realise the collapse of its system," the Rodong Sinmun newspaper said, referring to North Korea by the initials of its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
North Korea and the United States have been at loggerheads over the North's nuclear weapons programmes and Bush branded the North as part of an "axis of evil" in 2002.
But both countries later joined six-party talks aimed at persuading the North to give up its nuclear ambitions. The talks have stalled and North Korea has said it would not rejoin them unless the United States dropped its "hostile policy".
As part of its plans against North Korea, the United States was "increasing the broadcasting hours of free Asia toward it and massively infiltrating into it portable transistor radios and impure publications and video materials", Rodong Sinmun said, apparently referring to US-based Radio Free Asia.
"Such stratagem can never work," the state-run newspaper said in a commentary carried by the North's KCNA news agency.
"If vigilance is dulled against such US moves, they may bring no less serious consequences than open military aggression," it said.