The official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said Kim's inspection fell on Saturday -- in an unusual disclosure of timing -- to mark the 77th birthday of the North's military. As usual, the report gave no location for the unit.

"Expressing great satisfaction... he advanced important tasks which would serve as guidelines for bolstering the (military) into invincible revolutionary forces," the agency said.

Kim also enjoyed a music performance by state choruses singing "We Will Defend the Leadership of the Revolution at the Cost of Our Lives" on the day, KCNA said in a separate dispatch Sunday.

Kim's reported activities coincided with the North's announcement that it had started reprocessing spent fuel rods to make weapons-grade plutonium, in a new tit-for-tat escalation of tensions since the April 5 launch.

The move by Pyongyang came just hours after the United Nations slapped sanctions on three North Korean firms accused of backing missile development.

The United States Saturday immediately blasted the North's decision to reactivate its nuclear program and called for the reclusive communist state to return to international denuclearisation talks.

Pyongyang said on April 14 it would quit the six-nation process and restart its atomic weapons programme in protest at the UN Security Council's condemnation of the launch.

North Korea insists it put a satellite into orbit, but the United States and its allies say the launch was a disguised long-range ballistic missile test.

Outraged by the UN action, the North expelled inspectors from the United States and the International Atomic Energy Agency who had been monitoring its stated efforts to dismantle its nuclear programmes.

The North had been disabling its nuclear complex at Yongbyon, north of Pyongyang, under a February 2007 six-nation deal involving the two Koreas, the United States, China, Russia and Japan.

But the six-party negotiations stalled last December because of disputes about ways to verify declared nuclear activities.

The North, which carried out its first nuclear test in October 2006, reportedly put the size of its plutonium stockpile at 31 kilograms -- enough to make six to eight bombs -- in its nuclear declaration in June 2008.

Rodong Sinmun, the North's ruling communist party-published newspaper, on Sunday again praised what it calls an independent and successful rocket launch.

"The DPRK (North Korea) succeeded in launching the satellite by its own efforts and technology at one go but the US and Japan have the precedents of failures," the paper said in a commentary.

The United States and South Korea have said the launch failed to get anything into orbit, saying the rocket, along with its payload, fell into the Pacific. A Russian military source also said the launch was a failure.

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