N. Korean warning as US, South begin drill
Print Edition
Tens of thousands of South Korean and US troops yesterday began a military exercise simulating an all-out North Korean attack, as Pyongyang matched Seoul in resuming a loudspeaker propaganda campaign across their heavily-fortified border.
The annual Ulchi Freedom exercise, which will run through August 28, is largely computer-simulated, but still involves 50,000 Korean and 30,000 US soldiers.
The drill plays out a full-scale invasion scenario by nuclear-armed North Korea and both Seoul and Washington insist it remains purely defensive in nature.
Pyongyang views Ulchi Freedom — along with other annual South Korea-US drills — as wilfully provocative and had threatened the “strongest military counter-action” should this year’s exercise go ahead. “Such large-scale joint military exercises ... are little short of a declaration of a war,” North Korea’s Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea said last week.
Military tensions are already running high along the Korean Peninsula after South Korea blamed North Korea for landmine blasts that maimed members of a border patrol earlier this month.
South Korea retaliated by resuming high-decibel propaganda broadcasts across the border, using loudspeakers that had lain silent for more than a decade.
North Korea has denied any involvement in the mine blasts and threatened “indiscriminate” strikes against South border units unless the broadcasts were halted.
But yesterday Seoul’s defense ministry reported that Pyongyang had resumed its own loudspeaker propaganda campaign at a site on the eastern side of the border.
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