It said a US smear campaign aimed at bringing down the regime had forced Pyongyang to consider pulling out of international talks to resolve the standoff over its nuclear programmes.

"Under this situation the DPRK (North Korea) is compelled to seriously reconsider its participation in the talks with the US, a party extremely disgusting and hateful," the statement from Pyongyang's Foreign Ministry said.

The unusual statement followed news reports that a purge had been carried out inside the ruling elite in North Korea and that leader Kim Jong-Il's grip on power was weakening.

The statement lamented how "utterly ignorant" Washington was of the realities inside North Korea and denounced such reports as US-orchestrated disinformation intended to promote regime change by stealth.

"The system in the DPRK (North Korea) is politically stable and is as firm as a rock," the statement, carried by the official Korean Central News Agency, said.

"The smear campaign on the part of the hostile forces aimed at the collapse of the system in the DPRK is nothing but a desperate last-ditch effort to destroy the system under which the leader, the party and the popular masses form a harmonious whole."

More than five decades after the founding of the North Korean state, analysts and media reports have spoken of cracks appearing in the once-monolithic facade of the world's most tightly controlled country.

Pictures of leader Kim Jong-Il have reportedly gone missing and anti-government posters and flyers have appeared in some places.

In one of the more serious signs, the New York Times, citing a magazine editor in South Korea, reported last month that 130 generals had defected to China in recent years.

The foreign ministry statement denied the New York Times report and said it was part of the US smear campaign to bring the country down.

"Quite contrary to what the US claimed, not even a button of a general officer's uniform, to say nothing of more than a hundred of general officers, has ever been found across the border," the statement, attributed to an unnamed ministry spokesman, said.

The statement denied the existence of defectors, although it added that an insignificant number of North Koreans had committed crimes in their homeland and then fled to escape justice.

Non-government organisations and human rights groups say up to 300,000 North Koreans are living in northern China.

The foreign ministry statement dismissed reports of a power struggle inside the Stalinist state.

Kim's brother-in-law Chang Sung-Taek, one of the most powerful men in North Korea, was purged recently as Kim's number two in the military, according to Seoul's National Intelligence Service.

Earlier this year, Kim also tightened the criminal code to impose stiffer penalties for anti-government unrest and political dissent.

The statement said the recent US-led propaganda campaign had gone beyond "the tolerance limit" and may force North Korea to pull out of dialogue to resolve the long-standing dispute over its drive for nuclear weapons.

Efforts to end North Korea's nuclear weapons ambitions have stalled after three rounds of talks between the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States in Beijing. Pyongyang boycotted the last round in September.

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