North Korea Called Top Military Threat

U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said on Sunday that the Pentagon sees North Korea as the most serious military threat.

"Wars might happen tomorrow in Korea and Iraq," Mr. Wolfowitz said. But he made clear that the Department of Defense views North Korea as the more serious threat, given the United States' defeat of Iraq in the 1991 Persian Gulf war. "We face enormous conventional threats from North Korea," he said.

The department's second-in-command listed readiness training, dealing with infrastructure problems, boosting military pay and investing in missile defense as top spending priorities. "As long as we were constrained by the ABM treaty," he said, "we were limited from doing those things which would allow us to do missile defense most efficiently."