Washington and Seoul are already in talks to send further strategic assets to the Korean peninsula, a day after a US B-52 bomber flew over the South in a show of military force.
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“The United States and South Korea are continuously and closely having discussions on additional deployment of strategic assets”, the spokesman, Kim Min-seok, said.
The heavy bomber, which is capable of carrying nuclear missiles and bombs, was accompanied by a pair of South Korean air force F-15s and two U.S. air force F-16s. Seoul on Monday continued anti-Pyongyang propaganda broadcasts across the border and announced that it would further limit the entry of South Koreans to a jointly run factory park in North Korea.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un called on his scientists to do more to boost the country’s arsenal after the regime conducted its fourth nuclear test last week in defiance of neighbours including China and South Korea.
China has implemented a round-the-clock radiation monitoring system on the country’s border with North Korea after Pyongyang claimed last week to have tested a hydrogen bomb.
Such is the importance of ideology in the reclusive North that the previous round of inter-Korean psychological warfare pressured Pyongyang into last August’s landmark cooperation deal – albeit not before an exchange of fire.
The decision will likely reduce the number of South Koreans staying there from around 800 per day to some 650, he added.
“It is the legitimate right of a sovereign state and a fair action that nobody can criticize”, the North’s Korean Central News Agency quoted Kim as saying during a tour of the Armed Forces Ministry.
South Korean troops, near about 10 sites where loudspeakers started blaring propaganda yesterday, were on the highest alert, but have yet to detect any unusual movement from the North Korean military along the border, an official from Seoul’s Defense Ministry, who refused to be named, citing office rules, said.
An analysis by the U.S. Geological Survey fixed the coordinates of the bomb test in northeastern North Korea, an isolated and heavily forested area about 6,000 feet in elevation.
In addition to its psycological warfare, Seoul is also going to restrict the entry of South Korean workers into the joint Kaesong industrial complex.
“After North Korea conducted a nuclear test, its military may stage unexpected provocations”, Lee said when visiting the U.S. airbase in Osan with commander of USA forces in South Korea Curtis Scaparotti.
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North Korea carried out three atomic bomb tests between 2006 and 2013, leading to stiff sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council.
