New York — Faced with Pyongyang's continued threats to reopen its Soviet-era reactors, U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned Monday in Washington that the United States is capable of fighting a war against North Korea — even during a possible invasion of Iraq and the war on terror.

Mr. Rumsfeld issued the warning after a reporter asked whether the Pyongyang regime sees the looming Iraq crisis as an opportunity to build up a nuclear arsenal while Washington is distracted.

"I have no reason to believe that you're correct that North Korea feels emboldened because of the world's interest in Iraq," Mr. Rumsfeld said, stressing that no military action is imminent. But he warned that it would be a mistake for the reclusive Stalinist country's leadership to assume that the U.S. military is overextended.

"We are capable of winning decisively in one, and swiftly defeating in the case of the other," he said. "Let there be no doubt about it."

North Korea said on Sunday that it is scrapping a 1994 deal that allows the United Nations to seal and keep cameras in nuclear facilities that U.S. officials say could yield plutonium for weapons. Pyongyang said it is reactivating the nuclear plants to generate electricity, which it added is in short supply since the United States halted oil shipments in reaction to North Korea's admissions of a nuclear-weapons program.

North Korea's sabre-rattling may be a diplomatic bluff, one of the few negotiating items remaining to the police state that has lost its Soviet-era subsidies, has been ravaged by droughts and has endured economic blockades, leaving millions of its citizens starving.

Even as North Korean officials reportedly were reactivating its mothballed Yongbyon nuclear plant, the country's state-run news media urged the United States to come to an agreement not to invade the country.

"If the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula is to be settled properly, the U.S. should stop posing a nuclear threat to [North Korea] and accept [North Korea's] proposal for the conclusion of a non-aggression treaty between the two countries," the North's official Rodong Sinmun newspaper says in an editorial.

Despite Mr. Rumsfeld's warning, the U.S. government hopes for a diplomatic solution to the growing geopolitical crisis.

On Monday, Republican Congressman Curt Weldon, a senior member of the House of Representatives armed-services committee, said he is seeking visas to lead a congressional delegation to Pyongyang for talks with North Korean officials.

"When you don't have dialogue, that is when the problems develop, and that's my concern with North Korea," Mr. Weldon said.

China and Russia also are pushing for diplomatic agreements with North Korea, not only to ease the crisis but to prevent the country from becoming a declared nuclear power.

In Moscow on Monday, deputy foreign minister Georgy Mamedov was quoted as blaming U.S. President George W. Bush for having included North Korea in his "axis of evil."

"How should a small country feel when it is told that it is all but part of forces of evil of biblical proportions and should be fought against until total annihilation?" Mr. Mamedov said in the Vremya Novostei daily newspaper.

But other countries, including Canada, were less understanding of North Korea's position.

"I fully share the profound concern voiced by the United States, Japan, South Korea and other countries about [North Korea's] nuclear activities," Foreign Minister Bill Graham said yesterday. "These developments are a very serious threat to regional and international peace and security and to the stability of the Korean peninsula."

Others ridiculed Pyongyang's justification for reopening the Yongbyon plant.

Mark Gwozdecky, a spokesman for the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, said, "There isn't any legitimate purpose for the facility other than separating plutonium from spent fuel," a step in the process of making nuclear weapons. The Vienna-based UAEA believes North Korea has unsealed a chamber holding 8,000 irradiated fuel rods with enough plutonium to make four or five nuclear weapons within months.

Mr. Rumsfeld said, "They don't need a nuclear-power plant. Their power grid couldn't even absorb that."

With reports from AP and Reuters