Kim Jong Il (right)

Tae, a 40-something taxi driver with gappy teeth, thumped his fist on the steering wheel as he drove his Japanese car through the wide streets of Pyongyang.

"Imperialists are trying to overthrow our country," he said, "The Bush administration has pushed us very much, and if we hadn't reacted, we would have become like Iraq.

That's why we have our songun (military-first) policy, and that's why we need nuclear weapons."

Fifty-five years after the Americans invaded North Korea, according to the communist stronghold's version of history, this country remains on high alert, said a report in the Financial Times.

A North Korean memorial

To live in North Korea is to be threatened constantly with a repeat of the events that blighted the peninsula during the first 53 years of the 20th century--war and oppression at the hands of a brutal colonial aggressor.

Billboards on seemingly every building, and murals of 'Eternal President Kim Il Sung' on almost every corner, exhort: "Let's exterminate US imperialists! Long live the military-first policy! Let's build a strong and powerful nation!"

Films, songs and even postage stamps remind the people that the American 'imperialists' could come again to their half of the peninsula.

Moon Keum Hwi, a tour guide in central Pyongyang, said: "We didn't develop nuclear weapons to attack another country--they are just to defend the sovereignty of our nation. The US forced us into making nuclear weapons."

Kim Jong Il

North Koreans like Tae and Moon are fed a steady diet of war cries, historical distortions and anti-American bluster, which they happily recount to foreigners, although it is impossible to tell whether they believe it.

As evidence that the US threat was very real, Pyongyang recently lambasted South Korea and America for holding joint military exercises to prepare for a confrontation with the North.

Tae was both dismayed and outraged by the exercises. "Why else would they practise like this if not to invade"

Although the main sticking point has been whether the North should be allowed to retain a peaceful nuclear energy program, the US 'hostility' has remained a useful impediment for leader Kim Jong Il's regime to invoke. Analysts say Pyongyang uses this perception to unify and control the populace.

"There are incentives for any state to exaggerate an external threat," Daniel Pinkston, a Korea specialist at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California told the Times. "Even if you're living under wretched conditions, you think it is better than the alternative."

This is also how the regime explains the cost of the songun policy to impoverished North Koreans, three million of whom could be going without staple cereals by November, according to the World Food Programme. South Korea's Unification Ministry estimates that defence expenditure takes up about 30 percent of the North's annual budget.

Tae said: "It is true that our people do not live as well as in the UK or France, but if the Americans invade our country, then we will return to colonial life. The Americans are still occupying South Korea now."

The combination of this perceived threat and the importance of 'keeping face' has apparently helped keep Pyongyang from agreeing to dismantle its weapons facilities.

As Colonel Kim Kwan Gil of the Korean People's Army put it: "We don't want war, but we are not afraid of it. We want peace, but we will not beg for it."

Tae said: "It is true that our people do not live as well as in the UK or France or New Zealand, but if the Americans invade our country, then we will return to colonial life, just like in the past. The Americans are still occupying South Korea now."