The communist country's official mouthpiece, which compared Bush to Hitler on Monday in a comments dismissed as inappropriate by the US State Department, repeated remarks that it did not believe dialogue could defuse the stand-off.

The strongly worded statements were issued in response to Bush's description last week of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il as a tyrant.

"Bush is, in fact, a thrice-cursed fascist tyrant and man-killer as he revived the fascist war doctrine which had been judged by humankind long ago and is now bringing dark clouds of a new Cold War to hang over our planet and indiscriminately massacring innocent civilians after igniting the Afghan and Iraqi wars," said the statement on the official Korean Central News Agency.

"It is the greatest tragedy for the US that Bush, a political idiot and human trash, still remains in the presidential office of the world's only 'superpower,' styling himself 'an emperor of the world'."

The statement also repeated North Korea's long-held assertion that the United States is bidding to topple the communist regime, and claimed that ongoing US-South Korean military exercises were part of a build-up to war.

"Now that the US has clearly revealed its true intention, the DPRK (North Korea) can no longer pin any hope on the six-party talks and there is a question as to whether there is any need for it to negotiate with the US any more," the statement said.

Meanwhile South Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Lee Soo-Hyuk left for Beijing Tuesday to discuss ways to end the apparent deadlock in six-party talks -- also involving the United States, Russia and Japan -- on curbing North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

Lee was expected to hold an in-flight meeting with Wu Dawei, China's newly appointed vice foreign minister who was returning home following a visit to Seoul, before beginning talks in earnest in Beijing, Yonhap news agency said.

Lee, who is scheduled to return home on Wednesday, also plans to visit Tokyo on Thursday and Friday before heading to the United States and Russia next week.

The US State Department said it believed North Korea would attend the next round of six-party talks scheduled before the end of next month despite the strong attack on Monday which described Bush as an "imbecile" and a "tyrant" worse than Adolf Hitler.

The stand-off over the North's quest for nuclear weapons began in October 2002 when Washington accused it of operating a secret programme based on enriched uranium in breach of a 1994 accord on freezing its separate plutonium program.

Pyongyang has denied running the uranium-based program but has restarted its plutonium program.

The two-week Ulchi Focus Lens operation got under way Monday, focusing on computer simulation drills involving an unspecified number of South Korean troops and 14,500 US troops.

All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.