SEOUL – The top leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea has called for bolstering up the navy's combat power while inspecting the country's major shipyards, according to the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

The basic orientation for radically bolstering up the navy's combat power is "to simultaneously push forward with the modernization of water-surface and underwater warships and the further improvement of their operational capabilities," KCNA quoted Kim Jong-un, general secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea and president of the State Affairs of the DPRK, as saying.

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He stressed the need to decisively enhance the warship-building capacity on the basis of the existing experience and technology and "put spurs to the improvement of overall technical processes" in a bid to build a large number of modern warships of different missions desired by the naval force.

The DPRK leader also learned about the building of a nuclear-powered strategic guided missile submarine.

The DPRK would "never remain an idle onlooker to the naval and underwater military activities of the enemies," he said.

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Kim said the DPRK will "reliably defend the maritime sovereignty and firmly ensure a security guarantee on the Korean Peninsula and in the region through the important innovations and changes of its naval force and the upper hand in the ever-evolving strength."

The KCNA report did not specify when Kim visited the shipyards.