Pyongyang fires missiles in retaliation against South Korea-US drills

The missile launches came with a stern warning from Pyongyang’s Korean People’s Army that this year’s military drills would bring the peninsula 'towards the brink of war'.

Powered by automated translation

SEOUL // North Korea fired two short-range ballistic missiles into the sea and vowed “merciless” retaliation on Monday as the US and South Korea launched joint military drills.

The annual exercises, denounced by Pyongyang as recklessly confrontational, always trigger a surge in military tensions and warlike rhetoric on the divided peninsula.

Analysts saw the North’s missile tests as a prelude to a concerted campaign of sabre-rattling.

“If there is a particularly sharp escalation, we could see the North orchestrating some kind of clash on the maritime border,” said Jeung Young-tae, an analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul.

The missile launches came with a stern warning from Pyongyang’s nuclear-armed Korean People’s Army (KPA) that this year’s military drills would bring the peninsula “towards the brink of war”.

South Korea’s defence ministry said the Scud missiles were fired from the western port city of Nampo and fell into the sea off the east coast – a distance of nearly 500 kilometres.

UN resolutions ban any ballistic missile test by North Korea, and Seoul’x defence ministry said Pyongyang appeared intent on triggering a “security crisis”.

“We will respond sternly and strongly to any provocation,” said its spokesman Kim Min-seok.

Japan said it had issued a strong protest to the North given the danger such missile launches posed to aviation and shipping, while China urged the two Koreas to exercise restraint.

Missile tests have long been a preferred North Korean method of expressing anger and displeasure with what it views as confrontational behaviour by the South and its allies.

“The situation on the Korean peninsula is again inching close to the brink of a war,” a spokesman for the KPA general staff said, according to the North’s official KCNA news agency.

“The only means to cope with the aggression and war by the US imperialists and their followers is neither dialogue nor peace. They should be dealt with only by merciless strikes.”

North Korea has threatened attacks, including nuclear strikes, on the US before, although it has never demonstrated a missile capability that would encompass the US mainland.

Seoul and Washington insist the exercises are defence-based in nature, but they are regularly condemned by Pyongyang as provocative rehearsals for invasion.

North Korea has carried out three nuclear tests: in 2006, 2009 and 2013.

In January the North offered a moratorium on further tests if this year’s joint drills were cancelled -- a proposal rejected by Washington as an “implicit threat” to carry out a fourth atomic detonation.

Analyst Mr Jeung said Pyongyang was unlikely to conduct a fourth test in protest against the exercises.

“Nuclear tests carry more significance than that,” he said, noting that the North’s testing schedule was mainly driven by technical development.

A new research report by US experts published last week estimated that North Korea could be on track to have an arsenal of 100 nuclear weapons by 2020.

* Agence France-Presse