For the administration of George W. Bush, the two nations are the remaining duo from the famed "axis of evil" which, prior to the US-led war on Iraq, also included Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

With Saddam now out of the way, Tehran and Pyongyang are targets of the US administration's vitriol, recently dubbed "outposts of tyranny" by new US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Fear of seeing the two countries threaten the United States and its allies with weapons of mass destruction (WMD), or the feeding of a worldwide terror network with nuclear products, is Washington's nightmare.

Pyongyang, however, has just said it would not be going back to multilateral negotiations on its nuclear program, stating that it wants to boost its nuclear potential in response to a US "hostile" attitude.

But Tehran is engaged in delicate talks with Britain, Germany and France who hope to get it to abandon all its military nuclear ambitions.

The United States, however, cannot hide its profound scepticism over the success of these efforts.

Ivo Daalder, foreign policy specialist at Brookings Institutions, says that hard rhetoric about these regimes fails to conceal the difficulties that exist in really finding solutions.

"I think they have pursued a consistent strategy all along on both issues, which is that they believe that the nuclear problem cannot be solved as long as you have the current regimes in place," Daalder said.

The administration says it favors a peaceful solution to tackle dangers present in the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs, before it would consider any military option.

Different tactics are needed for dealing with the stalinist regime of Kim Jong-Il, believed to have an atomic weapon, and with the Iranian clerics in power who are accused of seeking to possess a weapon.

"They are two different circumstances," State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said Friday. "They are two different countries. There are two different dynamics at work."

Rice, meanwhile, also distinguishes between the two countries, according to her comments during interviews given in her recent European tour.

Dialogue with North Korea is something expected to "take time." "Because this is a multilateral forum, when the north koreans walk out or refuse to go back, that is not just the United States with which they are dealing, it is the rest of their neighborhood as well," Rice said.

China, South Korea, Russia and Japan are also party to the talks.

Rice, however, calls the Iranian issue "urgent". "It has to be seen in the context, and Iran that is in other ways out of step with important trends in the Middle East in terms of its support for terrorism, in terms of its treatment of its own people ...

"The Iranian are on the wrong side of the divide on a number of issues."

US authorities, meanwhile, hope some kind of solution might come in the form of a popular uprising in Iran -- an option that appears far from likely for North Korea.

The two countries' defense arsenal is also being evaluated here in a very different way. While giving Pyongyang from time to time security assurances, Washington is periodically treating Tehran to the sound of army boots.

"They did consider, as the Clinton administration did consider before them, the notion of military action against North Korea was not a viable option," said Rose Gottemoeller, an expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

As far as Iran is concerned, the administration, according to Gottemoeller, "constantly makes noises about regime change and most recently even some military action to change the regime in Tehran."

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