This year’s Ulchi Freedom Guardian drills that began Monday for a 12-day run are largely computer-simulated war games. Last week, South Korean officials announced North Korea’s deputy ambassador to the United Kingdom defected to South Korea. The drill is largely computer-simulated but still involves around 50,000 Korean and 25,000 USA soldiers.
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The United Nations Command Military Armistice Commission informed the North Korean People’s Army of the exercise through the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom and emphasized that the drills are defensive in nature.
“It is regrettable that North Korea threatens to conduct a pre-emptive nuclear attack on the South”, Jeong Joon-hee, a spokesman for the Ministry of Unification, said.
The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed North Korea resumed plutonium production in 2016, a move Seoul condemned on Monday, according to News 1.
Now, state media in Pyongyang have warned the country’s “first-strike” units are ready to mount retaliatory attacks on South Korean and USA forces involved in the drills. A statement said that “nuclear war may break out any moment” on the Korean peninsula.
North Korea has already boosted such war rhetoric because of the planned deployment of the US Terminal High-Altitude Area Defence system in South Korea, which Washington and Seoul says is needed because of the increasing North Korean threats.
North Korea is developing a nuclear program despite global sanctions against the initiative, though its exact capabilities are a cause of much speculation.
The North’s official KCNA news agency described Thae as “human scum” and said he had fled to avoid criminal charges including embezzling funds and raping a minor.
On Sunday, a South Korean Unification Ministry official said its neighbour could resort to assassinations and kidnappings in revenge for recent defections.
The exercise takes place nearly exactly one year after North Korean troops shelled South Korean territory and only days after South Korea welcomed the highest-ranking North Korean official defector in decades.
South Korea and USA are now waging where to place a missile defense system known as THAAD, drawing ire from the North.
Under Kim Jong Un’s leadership North Korea has become further isolated from the west. “This does not mean North Korea is on the brink of collapse”.
“A new round of sanctions on North Korea went into effect this spring”, she notes. If the North’s stock of weapons-grade uranium is included, the institute believes Pyongyang has enough material to make between 13 to 21 nuclear weapons, according to estimates up to this summer.
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Tensions have been heightened since Pyongyang’s fourth nuclear test in January, followed by multiple missile tests throughout the year.
