Speaking at a ceremony at the memorial for veterans of the 1950-1953 conflict here, the Pentagon's number two alluded to the tense standoff over North Korea's drive to build nuclear weapons.

"From thousands of miles above the Earth, you can still see the lights of Seoul, a dazzling metropolis of freedom and prosperity and energy," Wolfowitz said.

"Just 30 miles (50 kilometers) to the north, it's completely the opposite. Not light, but darkness. Which is an appropriate symbol for a land that has no freedom and still little hope, a place where tyrants spend that nation's meager resources on nuclear weapons while its people starve," he added, referring to North Korea.

"Until things change in North Korea, we must guard against renewed aggressions," he warned

Wolfowitz dismissed the view that the Korean War ended in a "stalemate".

"Some have concluded erroneously that the Korean War was a stalemate. To the contrary, because we took a determined stance, because our men and women fought and sacrificed, the people of South Korea have had half a century of peace, 50 years to build a dynamic democracy in a thriving economy. That is no stalemate," he noted.

The war ended on July 27, 1953 under the armistice accord but hostilities never officially ended on the Korean peninsula.

The armistice was never replaced by a peace treaty and 37,000 US and 700,000 South Korean troops face off against North Korea's 1.1 million strong army over a border that remains one of the world's most dangerous flashpoints.

An estimated four million people, most of them civilians, died during the three-year Korean War.

Friday, President George W. Bush paid homage to US soldiers killed in the Korean War -- which has become known as the "forgotten war" -- as he toured the Korean War Veterans Memorial, a set of 19 steel statues of US troops marching in grim formation towards an unknown destination.

The monument only opened in 1995 after years of campaigning by veterans groups.

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