“If the enemy provokes again, do not hesitate and retaliate resolutely”, Admiral Choi Yoon-hee instructed a frontline unit after accusing the North of planting the landmines responsible for seriously wounding two South Korean soldiers on August 4.
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The two Koreas have agreed to hike the minimum wage for North Korean workers at the joint Kaesong Industrial Complex by five percent. North Korea considers such activities as provocative and a preparation for war.
The United Nations Command, headed by the U.S. military and which oversees the armistice, also condemned what it called the North’s violation of the truce.
The North has also targeted the US with its verbal broadsides, citing its nuclear arsenal amid threats of retaliation over Ulchi Freedom.
Responding to the North Korean movement, another military official said, “We are ready to fight back against whatever provocations the North Korean military attempts”.
“By taking into account the grave situation facing inter-Korean ties, the government plans to take measures to develop the complex”, the ministry official was quoted as saying by news agency Yonhap, reflecting South Korea’s aim to protect Kaesong from politics.
“Such large-scale joint military exercises… are little short of a declaration of a war”, the North’s Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea, which oversees cross-border issues, said last week.
In 2009, North Korea announced that it had “tremendous military muscle and its own method of strike able to conquer any targets in its vicinity at one stroke or hit the U.S. on the raw, if necessary”.
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North Korea resumed its propaganda broadcasting operations at the border in return, setting off the inter-Korean psychological warfare, which had ended in 2004 under a mutual agreement. Since then, it has indicated that it is raising the minimum wage by 5.18% from US$70.35 to US$74, or 0.18 percentage points more than the ceiling. The film stars Rogen and James Franco as journalists who are given the opportunity to interview North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. John Delury, a professor at South Korea’s Yonsei university, told the BBC in 2013 that an artillery attack on a South Korean island in 2010 had been presaged by threats against military exercises in the area.
