SEOUL, Sept 9: North Korea celebrated its 55th birthday on Tuesday with a huge parade and a fresh vow to boost its nuclear deterrent force, but put no military hardware on display despite speculation it would showcase a new missile.

The communist state, which is involved in six-country efforts to defuse a crisis over its nuclear intentions, accused the United States of maintaining a hostile policy toward it.

But the parade, at which leader Kim Jong-il took the salute, passed off without any of the overt provocative gestures defence analysts had said were possible.

The chief of the North Korean army’s General Staff took a renewed swipe at the United States and said Pyongyang would defend its sovereignty at all costs.

“The DPRK will continue to increase its nuclear deterrent force as a means for just self-defence in order to defend the sovereignty of the country as the United States has not yet shown its will to drop its hostile policy,” General Kim Yong-chun said in a televised speech at the parade.

DPRK stands for the North’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Kim Jong-il reviewed thousands of goose-stepping soldiers and flag-waving civilians as they marched through Pyongyang’s Kim Il-sung Square, named after his late father and state founder.

The Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was proclaimed on September 9, 1948, as the Cold War gripped the peninsula and split it into communist and capitalist camps.

More than half a century on, the North is close to economic collapse and at odds with regional powers — not just Washington — over its nuclear weapons ambitions.

“REALLY BLUFFING”: North Korea has said on several occasions since last month’s talks in Beijing on the North’s nuclear ambitions that it had no other choice but to enhance its atomic deterrent.