U.S. Navy troops will be ordered to hail and request permission to inspect DPRK's ships at high seas, which are suspected of carrying arms or nuclear technology, but will not board them by force, The New York Times reported on its website on Tuesday.

The Obama administration is prepared to vigorously enforce the latest UN Security Council resolution, which was approved on Friday, the newspaper quoted sources as saying. U.S. Navy vessels might track DPRK's ships to their next port, where U.S. will press for the inspections they refused at sea.

The planned American action stops short of the forced inspections that Pyongyang has said that it would consider as an act of war.

Still, the administration's plans, if fully executed, would amount to the most confrontational approach taken by the United States in dealing with DPRK in years, and carries a risk of escalating tensions at a time when Pyongyang has been carrying out missile and nuclear tests, the report said.

In discussing U.S. strategy on Monday, Obama administration said that the U.S. would report any ship that refused inspection to the UN Security Council. While the Navy and American intelligence agencies continued to track the targeted ship, the administration would mount a vigorous diplomatic effort to insist that the inspections be carried out by any country that would allow the ship to port.

Until now, American interceptions of DPRK's ships have been rare, the report said. Early in the Bush administration, a shipment of missiles to Yemen was discovered, but the United States permitted the shipment to go through after the Yemenis said they had paid for the missiles and expected delivery. Under the new United Nations resolution, American officials said they now had the authority to seize such shipments.

The senior administration officials outlined Obama's approach a day before the U.S. president was to meet for the first time on Tuesday with South Korea's president, Lee Myung-bak, a conservative who has been far more confrontational in his dealings with DPRK than most of his predecessors, The New York Times report said.

Obama's decisions about DPRK stem from a fundamentally different assessment of the country's intentions than that of previous U.S. administrations. Nearly 16 years of on-and-off negotiations — punctuated by major crises in 1994 and 2003 — were based on an assumption that ultimately, DPRK was willing to give up its nuclear capability, the report said. A review, carried out by the Obama administration during its first month in office, concluded that DPRK had no intention of trading away what it calls its "nuclear deterrent" in return for food, fuel and security guarantees, it said.

By People's Daily Online